identifier stringlengths 1 43 | dataset stringclasses 3 values | question stringclasses 4 values | rank int64 0 99 | url stringlengths 14 1.88k | read_more_link stringclasses 1 value | language stringclasses 1 value | title stringlengths 0 200 | top_image stringlengths 0 125k | meta_img stringlengths 0 125k | images listlengths 0 18.2k | movies listlengths 0 484 | keywords listlengths 0 0 | meta_keywords listlengths 1 48.5k | tags null | authors listlengths 0 10 | publish_date stringlengths 19 32 ⌀ | summary stringclasses 1 value | meta_description stringlengths 0 258k | meta_lang stringclasses 68 values | meta_favicon stringlengths 0 20.2k | meta_site_name stringlengths 0 641 | canonical_link stringlengths 9 1.88k ⌀ | text stringlengths 0 100k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3747 | dbpedia | 1 | 82 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-09-ca-20312-story.html | en | Creed’s Success on the Charts Is Ruining Band’s Anonymity | https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/64e287b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2400x1260+0+0/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fdf%2F45%2F57d858144a2a88575fa2b03080bb%2Flatlogo-ss.jpg | https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/64e287b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2400x1260+0+0/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fdf%2F45%2F57d858144a2a88575fa2b03080bb%2Flatlogo-ss.jpg | [
"https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6a29128/2147483647/strip/true/crop/8170x5464+11+0/resize/320x214!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fad%2F89%2Fb0e76fcf411aa8f422036c48d421%2F1397567-et-sierra-ferrell-307.jpg 320w,https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/de... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"GEOFF BOUCHER"
] | 1999-10-09T00:00:00 | Pop Beat * Florida group has eschewed MTV for the Internet and touring to rack up impressive sales--and has the No. 1 album in the country. | en | /apple-touch-icon.png | Los Angeles Times | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-09-ca-20312-story.html | All those celebrities who complain about the unrelenting glare of the spotlight should give Scott Stapp a call. You know Stapp--he’s the lead singer of that big rock band, you know, the one with the new No. 1 album in the country?
No, no, not them. That other band--you know, Creed.
What, you mean you haven’t heard of them?
“Anonymous. . . . Yeah, we hear that a lot, and it’s not such a bad thing,” Stapp says. “We’ve sold millions of records, and nobody knows what we look like.”
Indeed, the Florida band remains somewhat faceless despite selling 4 million albums in the past two years, which is more than either U2, R.E.M. or the Smashing Pumpkins during the same span.
*
More impressive than the sheer album sales may be Creed’s old-school methods--almost ignoring MTV and videos altogether, it has instead cultivated a loyal fan base with intense touring, a savvy Internet presence and a strong showing on rock radio. But resisting what Stapp calls the “glitter machine” has given Creed a low profile even among industry types.
“We’ve done really well with their new album, but I couldn’t name a guy in the band,” admits Bob Feterl, regional manager for the Tower Records retail chain in Southern California. “But more power to them if they can make it work.”
Some big-selling “anonymous” bands continue chugging along--think Collective Soul--while others develop a personality, such as the Goo Goo Dolls, who started a late-career surge once singer John Rzeznik was pulled forward and presented as the group’s face. Stapp says Creed has not dwelt on its anonymous appeal but has looked to Metallica and Tool as bands with integrity that have used touring to create a career.
“We aren’t in it for the quick buck,” Stapp says. “We’re about the songs.”
And what is the Creed sound? Straight rock that echoes grunge acts such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, and most often finds its lyrical focus in matters of spirituality and metaphysics, reflecting songwriter Stapp’s childhood as the son of a strict Pentecostal minister in Orlando. His father’s strident ways and the sight of congregation members speaking in tongues left the young Stapp alienated, but he says he can’t separate himself completely from that heritage.
“Organized religion--I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I still don’t,” Stapp says. “But my father used to make me write the Psalms as punishment, and that is still there in my songwriting. . . . I still think about bigger things. Is there a God? Why am I here?”
While critics have been lukewarm on the band (they often drift into the vocabulary of faint praise, calling it “solid” and “hard-working”), the group’s melodies and melodrama play well in the heartland, as does its roadwork ethic, says Sky Daniels, general manager of Radio & Records, a radio industry trade magazine.
“Their success is a testimony to the fact that there’s always going to be a market for intelligent, melodic, memorable songs in the hard-rock vein,” says Daniels, a former deejay.
The songs, such as “One” and the title track from the first album, “My Own Prison,” may be memorable, but what about the band itself? “I couldn’t name two guys in the band, no way,” Daniels says.
The band’s die-hard fans can, however (for the record, they are Stapp, guitarist Mark Tremonti, bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips).
“My Own Prison,” recorded for $6,000, was the best-selling hard-rock release of 1998, and became the first debut album to spawn four No. 1 songs on the rock radio airplay charts.
The hunger for the band’s sophomore effort, “Human Clay,” helped it debut this week at No. 1 on the charts, beating out other new releases that enjoyed far more hype via publicity and traditional marketing, such as discs from Garth Brooks, Marc Anthony and Sting.
That’s not to say that the album arrived in a vacuum.
*
Daniels pointed to the savvy Internet campaign set up by the band’s indie label, Wind-Up Entertainment, as a model for how to spread the word about a new album and give fans samples of the music. They are also on the road, of course, and will visit the Hollywood Palladium on Nov. 10. “Touring,” Stapp says, “is what we are about.”
They may still be road warriors, but the growing stature of Creed is forcing the band members to give in somewhat to the glitter machine. They appear Tuesday on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” they’ve been tapped as executive producers for the soundtrack for the film “Scream 3,” and, perhaps most telling, their first major video, for the song “Higher,” is finally putting a face to the band on MTV.
How does the band feel about that? Stapp had a hard time disguising his disdain for the process when he was interviewed by MTV this week. “We don’t like the video,” he said during a snippet that will present him to new fans as a face for a faceless band. “It’s not what we envisioned. . . . We’re not a video band, we’re a rock band.” | ||
3747 | dbpedia | 2 | 4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Last_Breath_(Creed_song) | en | One Last Breath (Creed song) | [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Creed_one_last_breath.png",
"... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Wikimedia projects"
] | 2005-10-05T13:20:20+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Last_Breath_(Creed_song) | 2002 single by Creed
"One Last Breath"Single by Creedfrom the album Weathered ReleasedApril 15, 2002 ( )RecordedMid–late 2001StudioJ. Stanley Productions (Ocoee, Florida, US)Length3:58LabelSongwriter(s)Producer(s)
John Kurzweg
Kirk Kelsey
Creed
Creed singles chronology
"Bullets"
(2002) "One Last Breath"
(2002) "Hide"
(2002)
Music video on YouTube
"One Last Breath" is a power ballad by American rock band Creed. The band's lead vocalist, Scott Stapp, wrote the song over a period of three weeks and recorded at J. Stanley Productions Inc in Ocoee, Florida. The lyrics of the song are about reflecting on past mistakes and seeking comfort from friends who want to help. It was released in April 2002 as the third single from their third studio album, Weathered (2001).
The song reached number six on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming their fourth and final top-10 hit. It also reached number five on the Mainstream Rock chart and Billboard Hot 100 Airplay, number four on the Mainstream Top 40 chart, and number two on the Adult Top 40 chart. Worldwide, the song peaked at number 43 in Australia, number 29 in New Zealand, number 47 in the United Kingdom, where the song was released as a double A-side with "Bullets", and reached number 41 on the Irish Singles Chart.
Writing and recording
[edit]
Prior to recording the Weathered album, Creed had agreed that during the tour for Human Clay that no new songs could be written, so that the band members could "live life and have experiences". The band also agreed that they would not listen to any music between the ending of the Human Clay tour and the start of writing sessions for Weathered, so as not to allow any other music to subconsciously influence the band's writing process and to ensure that all the songs came completely from them. "One Last Breath" was written within a three-week period along with all the other material from the album, which was done primarily in Scott Stapp's living room during four-hour sessions, as well as on his Sea Ray cruiser.[2]
Stapp recalls the writing process for the song in a 2024 interview with Spin, stating "I didn’t feel any particular pressure to write a particular kind of song. I don’t think we ever thought that way; we just wrote what we felt. We just got together and created whatever came out, and we put on a record if we liked it." Stapp noted that after they had completed writing the song, the band felt that they had written something inspiration that would resonate with both them and the fans alike. The band would also use something they called "the goosebump test", where the song would have to give them literal goosebumps after the song was completely written, as they did not want to put any material on the record if it did not pass the test.[1]
The song was recorded and mixed at J. Stanley Productions Inc. recording studio in Ocoee, Florida, during the mid to late 2001 using Pro Tools.[3]
Music and lyrics
[edit]
As with all of Creed's songs, the music was written by guitarist Mark Tremonti. The song is written in the key of D major, with Tremonti playing in standard E tuning and Stapp singing in his traditional baritone with his vocal range spanning from D3-B4.[4][5] Tremonti stated in an interview with Songfacts that the song contains one of his favorite guitar lines and musical compositions that he ever wrote.[6]
"One Last Breath' is one of my favorite guitar lines, so it's one of my favorite musical compositions for Creed. It's a song that turned out to be one of our biggest songs we ever put out. I think it had some of the most views we've ever had on YouTube, so it's a very important one for the Creed camp." — Tremonti[6]
The lyrics, according to Stapp, were contributed by both he and Tremonti. Stapp recalls writing the lyrics to the verses over a loop of Tremonti's guitar picking, stating that they "came from the bottom of our hearts." He also recalls the artistic chemistry that he and Tremonti had, as well as the spiritual, emotional, and mental connection that would see them each provide lines that they found themselves articulating for each other. Stapp states, "We were on the same wavelength. [A specific lyrical line] may have come from a different place, but it was still one voice, and it was very special. And always straight from the heart."[1]
According to Stapp, the song is about someone crying out for help and realizing the mistakes they've made in their past, as well as being able to lean on one's friends and keeping them close. Stapp also expresses sentiments about how in the minds of "normal, well-adjusted" people, any thoughts of moving beyond this life are not real, and how these surreal thoughts are just flashes-in-the-pan and they would never act upon them.[7]
Further expanding on the meaning behind the song, Stapp recalls that lyrically, "One Last Breath" fit exactly where he personally was at the time, both in mind and spirit. The physical, emotional, and spiritual burnout he was experiencing at the time, which he attributes to the pressure on the band to constantly release new records as well as the aggressive touring schedule, was catching up to him. This, compounded with the taxing effect of the band's meteoric rise in previous years, eventually led him to go down several wrong paths in choosing how to cope with the pressure that would eventually lead to the band's breakup.[1] Mark Tremonti also recalls the song perfectly reflected where the band was at the time, as it was written during the initial stages of the band breaking apart. Calling that period the "darkest time for the band," "One Last Breath" is one of the band's most truthful songs and was "genuinely sung by Scott and genuinely played by us," according to Temonti.[1]
Release and reception
[edit]
Released on April 15, 2002,[8] as the third single from Weathered, the song was a chart success both in the United States and internationally. "One Last Breath" gave Creed their fourth and final top-10 hit on the US Billboard Hot 100, spending a total of 34 weeks on the chart and peaking at number six on the week of September 28, 2002.[9] The song also reached number five on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, number four on the Mainstream Top 40 chart, and number two on the Adult Top 40 chart.[10][11][12] Internationally, the song peaked at number 43 in Australia and number 29 in New Zealand.[13][14] In the United Kingdom and Ireland—where the song was released as a double A-side with "Bullets"—it peaked at number 47 on the UK Singles Chart and number 41 on the Irish Singles Chart.[15][16] It also charted in Germany, peaking at number 89.[17]
Music video
[edit]
The video was directed by Dave Meyers, who had previously directed the videos for "What If", "With Arms Wide Open" and "My Sacrifice". He would go on to co-direct the video for the band's next single, "Don't Stop Dancing", along with Stapp. Stapp drafted the treatment for the video and explained his ideas to Meyers. They soon found out they both had a shared love and affection for Salvador Dalí, a Spanish painter known for his surrealist artwork. Most of the video was shot against a green screen with computer-generated animations to create the setting in which the band performs in as well as the otherworldly visuals.[7]
"We've used surreal imagery in our artwork since the beginning, but this is the first video we've fully explored it in. "My Sacrifice" kind of started the surrealism vibe, but we took this one to a different level. There are backdrops kind of like 'Star Wars,' with all these computer-generated cities and scenes that look real but they're not." — Stapp[7]
On the day of the shoot, Stapp was involved in an automobile accident. On April 19, 2002, around 1:40 in the afternoon, Stapp, while driving his Cadillac SUV on Interstate 4 in Florida was struck from behind by a Ford SUV. According to Stapp, the vehicle was going at "probably 50 or 60 miles per hour". Stapp was sent flying forward in his vehicle, with his body hitting the steering wheel and his head hitting the windshield. Stapp, concerned about the wellbeing of the person who hit him, got out of his vehicle to check on the other driver. Although initially the officer on the scene reported no injuries, Stapp soon realized he had not gone unscathed while calling his manager after the accident. He had suffered a concussion from the whiplash and from hitting the windshield. Stapp claims that the police on the scene didn't note any injuries in their report because he refused to call an ambulance or go to the hospital.[18][19]
Due to prior commitments with director Dave Meyers, Stapp managed to show up to shoot the video the very next day where shooting began at 6:00 a.m. Actress Dawn Cairns, who appeared in the "My Sacrifice" video, also makes an appearance as the woman crying bloody tears into a bowl. The band flew her in from Argentina where she had just finished a shoot two days earlier. Beginning to feel the effects of the accident, Stapp had to be medicated during the shoot to deal with the pain in his head, neck, and spine, and was also suffering from a headache. A doctor and a masseuse were on site during the shooting of the video, and a body double was used for certain scenes Stapp was unable to complete. Stapp was limited in the video as he mainly just stood and sang with little movement or gesticulation. Meyers told Stapp during the shoot that his facial expressions from the pain actually helped in getting the emotion of the song to come across better and noted that he could tell Stapp was in terrible pain during the last shot of the video.[7][18]
After the shooting was completed, Stapp's pain continued to worsen, and after an MRI on his neck and back it was revealed that the extent of his injuries were worse than once thought. Doctors discovered he had a bulging disk between two vertebrae in his neck and a smashed disk in his lower back. An adjacent missing disk from a congenital condition likely worsened the situation.[18]
Appearances in media
[edit]
On September 16, 2014, "One Last Breath" was made available as downloadable content as part of the "Creed 5-Song Pack" for the video game Rocksmith 2014 along with "Higher", "My Own Prison", "My Sacrifice" and "With Arms Wide Open".[20]
Track listings
[edit]
Charts
[edit]
Certifications
[edit]
Region Certification Certified units/sales Brazil (Pro-Música Brasil)[36] Gold 30,000‡
‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
Release history
[edit]
Release dates and formats for "One Last Breath" Region Date Format(s) Label(s) Ref. United States April 15, 2002 Wind-up [8] May 13, 2002 [37] United Kingdom July 22, 2002 CD
Epic
Wind-up
[38] Australia September 23, 2002 [39] | ||||||
3747 | dbpedia | 1 | 36 | https://creedfisher.com/ | en | Creed Fisher | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/63867a6ca98d2878442b325f/t/63867f1f3de0961c1b8376d4/1669758760898/CF_Logo+1c.png?format=1500w | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/63867a6ca98d2878442b325f/t/63867f1f3de0961c1b8376d4/1669758760898/CF_Logo+1c.png?format=1500w | [
"https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=549425459790717&ev=PageView&noscript=1",
"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63867a6ca98d2878442b325f/884f28a7-9ab3-47bf-829e-5c7b6c0c2a17/Creed+Fisher+Line+white.png?format=1500w",
"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63867a6ca98d2878442b325f/1693583114831-4... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | https://assets.squarespace.com/universal/default-favicon.ico | Creed Fisher | https://creedfisher.com | "The odds were against me all along, but I just wouldn't go away." All-American musician Creed Fisher is a storyteller, hard worker, and a rising Outlaw Country star. With around 100 million streams on Spotify and nearly 60 million views on YouTube, Fisher’s raw, unfiltered, and unique sound blends traditional country with some modern elements.
After growing up in West Texas, he played professional football for around 9 years. When he retired from the game, Fisher used that passion and drive to fuel his music and convert his scars & pain into passion and determination. "A big part of my music is patriotic and for the working class. I relate to my music because I lived it." Creed Fisher reminds fans to never lose sight of who you are, where you’re from, and never fear hard work. His patriotism and life experiences thread throughout his songs to create powerful music that speaks to all. | |||
3747 | dbpedia | 1 | 61 | https://www.songfacts.com/facts/creed/whats-this-life-for | en | What's This Life For by Creed | [
"https://www.songfacts.com/images/logos/songfacts_logo.png",
"https://www.songfacts.com/images/logos/songfacts_logo.png",
"https://www.songfacts.com/img-artalbums-145-bad04b94a2701f5a549614bf06d00958.png",
"https://img.youtube.com/vi/8lKBro5YkPs/hqdefault.jpg",
"https://www.songfacts.com/img-artalbums-240-b... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | What's This Life For by Creed song meaning, lyric interpretation, video and chart position | en | /images/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png | null | I Can't Stand The RainAnn Peebles
Ann Peebles' "I Can't Stand The Rain" originated from a comment made by the singer to her husband, Don Bryant, when they were preparing to head out to a blues show and it began tipping down with rain.
Party DollBuddy Knox & the Rhythm Orchids
The drum sound on Buddy Knox's 1957 US #1 hit "Party Doll" was actually made by a cardboard box filled with cotton.
God Only KnowsThe Beach Boys
The most famous song to prominently feature a French horn is "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys.
Somebody Like YouKeith Urban
When Keith Urban played "Somebody Like You" for his girlfriend, she called him a hypocrite because he "sucked at relationships."
The Safety DanceMen Without Hats
The Men Without Hats lead singer wrote "The Safety Dance" after getting kicked out of a bar for dancing too aggressively. The song is literally about being safe to dance if you want to.
How The Beatles Crafted Killer ChorusesSong Writing
The author of Help! 100 Songwriting, Recording And Career Tips Used By The Beatles, explains how the group crafted their choruses so effectively.
Rick SpringfieldSongwriter Interviews
Rick has a surprising dark side, a strong feminine side and, in a certain TV show, a naked backside. But he still hasn't found Jessie's Girl.
Brian Kehew: The Man Behind The RemastersSong Writing
Brian has unearthed outtakes by Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello and hundreds of other artists for reissues. Here's how he does it.
La La Brooks of The CrystalsSong Writing
The lead singer on "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Then He Kissed Me," La La explains how and why Phil Spector replaced The Crystals with Darlene Love on "He's A Rebel." | |||||
3747 | dbpedia | 1 | 77 | https://www.songhall.org/profile/Linda_Creed | en | Songwriters Hall of Fame | [
"https://www.songhall.org/assets/images/logo.svg",
"https://www.songhall.org/assets/images/logo.png",
"https://www.songhall.org/asset/exhibit/125_img_anchor_home.jpg",
"https://www.songhall.org/asset/exhibit/125_img_anchor_home.jpg",
"https://www.songhall.org/asset/exhibit/125_img_anchor_home.jpg",
"https... | [] | [] | [
"songwriters",
"hall of fame",
"songhall",
"shof"
] | null | [] | 1948-08-13T00:00:00 | Songwriter's Hall of Fame | /apple-touch-icon.png | https://www.songhall.org/profile/Linda_Creed | Linda Creed found her way to the top of the best-selling charts as a member of a notable group of music makers known as the Philadelphia School. Born in the Quaker City in 1948, she attended Germantown High School, where she was active in music pursuits. In fact, during her high school years, she already was fronting her own band, Raw Soul, which made frequent appearances at the Philadelphia Athletic Club and at Sid Booker's Highline Lounge.
Out of school in the mid-'60s, and eager to move on, she left Philadelphia for New York, where she obtained a job as a secretary at the famed Mills Music publishing company. She also utilized the time to develop her skills as a lyricist, but after eight months of little success, and feeling defeated, she returned to her hometown, which later became the inspiration for the song, "I'm Coming Home," (co-written with another prominent Philadelphian, Thom Bell).
At age 22, Creed's patience was rewarded when her song, "Free Girl," was recorded by British artist Dusty Springfield. Soon, she had another favorable opportunity to join Mighty Three Music (an affiliate of Philadelphia International Records) headed by the successful songwriting trio of Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell. The association with Bell, led two years later to a recording of her song, "Stop, Look and Listen," by The Stylistics, a Philadelphia group whose records were being produced by Thom Bell. Thereafter, numerous hits followed in quick succession, among them were "You Are Everything," "I'm Stone in Love with You," "Betcha, By Golly, Wow," "Break Up to Make Up," "Rock n' Roll Baby," "Rubber Band Man."
In 1972, Linda Creed married Stephen Lee Epstein, and as though taking a cue from the happy event, her next recorded song was the mega hit, "You Make Me Feel Brand New." During this time, she wrote hit songs for The Spinners, Johnny Mathis, Teddy Pendergrass, Dionne Warwick, and others. Then, in 1976, she, with husband Eppy and baby daughter, Roni moved to California where very soon she was busily producing a project with Lonnie Jordan, lead singer of the group, War.
Later the same year, she underwent radical surgery for breast cancer. One month following her mastectomy, she was commissioned to write lyrics for the theme for a motion picture based on the life of Muhammad Ali. The song, later sung and recorded by George Benson, was "The Greatest Love of All," which was recorded a decade later by Whitney Houston. The recording became an enormous hit and one of the biggest to that moment by the star.
The Epstein family returned to Philadelphia in 1980, when Linda's second daughter, Dana, was born. During the early years of the '80s, Linda Creed enjoyed continuing success with her songs, with recordings by Johnny Gill, Stacy Latislaw, The Stylistics, Teddy Pendergrass, and of course, Whitney Houston. The song "Hold Me," written by Creed and Michael Masser, the man who had brought Linda into the Muhammad Ali project, was the first adult contemporary hit for Pendergrass. She also wrote the theme for the TV series, "Simon and Simon." Over the years, cover recordings of her songs were major hits for Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart, Smokey Robinson, Michael Jackson and numerous others.
Linda Creed lost her long lingering battle with cancer at the age of 37, when she died in April 1986. | ||||||
3747 | dbpedia | 1 | 20 | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a60247158/scott-stapp-creed-interview-2024/ | en | Scott Stapp and Creed Are Back and Ready to Go Higher | [
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/latest/fre/static/icons/search.f1c199c.svg",
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/latest/fre/static/icons/close.38e3324.svg",
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/latest/esquire/static/images/logos/logo.20861e6.svg?primary=navLogoColor",
"http... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Dave Holmes"
] | 2024-03-20T10:30:03.511451-04:00 | The singer and late-nineties icon talks candidly about rock-star partying, faith, the journey to sobriety, a new solo record, and his band’s undeniable “Creedsurgence” | en | /_assets/design-tokens/latest/esquire/static/images/favicon.9bd3ce0.ico | Esquire | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a60247158/scott-stapp-creed-interview-2024/ | There are certain people who will declare that a particular experience “opened up a Pandora’s box,” then pause thoughtfully and add “if you will.” If you know Scott Stapp’s work, you know Scott Stapp is one of these people. He is, as he has forever been, serious and sincere to the absolute max, in a way that makes you wonder why sincerious isn’t a word. Just as he was at the Y2K peak of his once-and-sort-of-future band Creed, Stapp in 2024 is both grandiose and grateful, with an evolved rock star’s proprietary mixture of humility and hubris. “By no means does rock ’n’ roll need a savior,” he says, in response to my not having asked him whether rock ’n’ roll needed a savior, “but with this record, I’m just looking for my place.”
The record in question is his fourth solo album, the sinceriously titled Higher Power. With ten huge, earnest, soaring, anthemic tracks, Higher Power is everything you love about Scott Stapp, and, out now, it arrives just in time for you to stop pretending you don’t love Scott Stapp. The album’s release and tour prep are happening amid what can only be called a Creedsurgence: The band’s music is suddenly popping on social media and streaming, something Stapp first noticed during the pandemic. “A younger generation started making videos, and it’s been this build since then,” he says. The night before he and I spoke, the band and its song “Higher” earned the last remaining piece of monocultural currency: a feature on a Super Bowl commercial. “And so it’s the alpha and omega of the story.”
Creed’s first three albums—My Own Prison, Human Clay,and Weathered—are among the biggest-selling rock records of the record industry’s biggest-selling years. By 2000, the band was on the cover of Spin, Stapp front and center, shirtless and in a truly unprecedented state of oiled-the-fuck-upness. At the turn of the millennium, they were all over MTV and VH1 and mainstream rock radio. The video for “With Arms Wide Open” featured Stapp, with jacket wide open, striking a messianic pose on the top of a mountain. Their Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game halftime show from 2001—all fist pumps and benevolent-rock-god poses from Stapp, surrounded by some kind of Up With People situation—belongs in the Louvre.
The national appetite for sinceriousness diminished greatly in the early aughts, as the Strokes and Interpol and Meet Me in the Bathroom crowd got all the attention. At the same time, the intra-Creed dynamics turned toxic and the substances took over. It got ugly, in ways we don’t need to dwell on.
But now it’s 2024. In addition to Higher Power, Stapp and the original lineup of Creed have a reunion tour ahead of them. There are no plans for new Creed music at this time, but this April there will be a Creed Cruise—two of them, actually, both sold out—so it seems that anything is possible. Things feel different now. When I found out I’d be speaking with Scott Stapp, I told approximately everyone I’d ever met, and roughly half of them said something along the lines of “I’ve actually been listening to a lot of Creed lately.” Excited about him always. But also, always with the actually.
So let’s go there. I spoke with Scott Stapp over Zoom as he prepared to take a long walk in a park near his Nashville home. He was in his car, in a parking spot, his youngest child’s Spider-Man car seat visible over his right shoulder. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SCOTT STAPP: Dave, you like the Spider-Man car seat in the back?
ESQUIRE: I do love that you have Spider-Man in the car with you. That must make you feel very secure.
SS: Spider-Man travels with me everywhere I go.
ESQ: Higher Power comes out March 15. You’re in the time after it’s out of your hands but before it’s in the world. How does that feel for you?
SS: It’s a different experience this time, in that by the time the album comes out, five songs off the record will already be out to the public. It’s not a big surprise, as it was back in the day, where fans had only heard one or two songs by the time the record came out. There are songs that I’m excited for fans to hear so they can put the pieces of the puzzle together. This album is a narrative to be listened to from beginning to end.
Stapp takes a bow at the Bands for Badges Music Festival on Cape Cod in August 2023. The overlay is an Esquire illustration of Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti.
ESQ: What’s the narrative of this one?
SS: Well, I’ll tell you, it starts with a journey of trying to reconnect to my higher power, whom I call God. Navigating this new way of life in sobriety and realizing that everything in my life stays together, contingent upon the shape of my spiritual condition. I was going through a lot in my life during the making of this record, and I’m gonna leave that up for interpretation. It’s still being played out. I’m still living it, and I haven’t reached the last two songs yet. A lot of times on these records, I’ll take the snapshots of where I’m at as I’m going through this process, and then I’ll write about where I want to end up, not where I’m at.
ESQ: Do you feel like your albums are understood the way that you intend?
SS: I know there is a core group of die-hard fans who know what I do and how I do it. They’ve caught on. But as a whole, especially in today’s music climate, people cherry-pick songs that they connect with, whether it just be a fun song or they’re going through a struggle in their life and the song encourages them. That’s the power and the beauty of music. The collective consciousness of the human experience is what I hope to encapsulate on every record.
ESQ: The theme of recovery runs through Higher Power. Does being so publicly sober add a layer of difficulty to sobriety itself?
SS: I think it’s good to share the journey that I’m trying to live. I’m not perfect on that journey. I take it one day at a time, and I’ll take ten steps forward and then one step back, and then I’ll take another ten steps forward. But having the sobriety that I’ve had during that last ten years has radically changed my life. It’s continuing to help me reconnect with parts of me that I’ve been disconnected from since I was a child. It’s also kind of opened up a Pandora’s box, if you will.
Parts of me were emotionally stunted due to the years of the partying lifestyle. Getting sober is just the tip of the iceberg. Catching up on all the years you lost is the real journey.
Creed at their peak, 1990s.
ESQ: Is it true that Eric Clapton and Steven Tyler were sort of your recovery sherpas?
SS: Yeah. Steven Tyler in 2010, when I started this journey—and again, like I told you, I’ve had many, many slips since—he called me nearly every day for about a month when I was in treatment at Betty Ford. And then Eric Clapton was gracious enough to allow me to stay at one of his facilities in Florida during another stage in the recovery process. I never spoke with him personally, but he made sure that I had the extra care and attention that I needed.
ESQ: Getting back to Higher Power, the music industry is very different from what it was during those first three Creed albums, when albums were like blockbuster films. What does success look like to you now?
SS: I’ve already succeeded in one regard: completing this record and getting it out to the world. So on one level, I feel complete. What happens after that, I can’t control. But after it’s out, if songs on that record are connecting with people in a substantial way? That’s what I do this for.
At some point, there is a part of you that wants the powers that be to finally get you. If that never happens, it never happens. But if that did happen on this record, that would be a third layer of success. I only experienced that kind of success early in my career, on My Own Prison and the first half of the Human Clay record.
ESQ: And then what happened?
SS: Well, the narrative shifted. The whole trying to pigeonhole us as Christian rock changed the narrative of the band. We went from being on the covers of magazines, being deemed the saviors of rock ’n’ roll, and then the next thing you know, the media had declared us the enemy of the state.
My first solo record went platinum, and it did get a lot of attention, but since then, my records have not gotten the exposure that I had hoped they would get. So I’m hoping that this record gets the exposure that I feel at this point, thirty years in, that I can humbly say that I think I’ve earned.
ESQ: Why do you think you guys specifically were so pigeonholed? You weren’t the only band that was wrestling with spiritual themes in its lyrics.
SS: I was pretty straightforward in my lyrics, in terms of what I believed in. And at the time, that wasn’t considered cool in the rock ’n’ roll community and on secular rock radio. Everything’s changed since then. There are many bands of faith that have tremendous success at mainstream rock formats. People are not defining and pigeonholing and putting music in niches just because of the writer’s personal beliefs. They’re just letting the music be music. And if it’s rock, they’re putting it out as rock. Skillet is a good example of that. P.O.D. has been a good example of that. Even Nicki Minaj has been straightforward and loud about her faith.
ESQ: But even at the time, P.O.D. didn’t get dinged for it. Jars of Clay didn’t. It seems like you in particular got a lot of flak.
SS: You know, it is what it is. But it seems that we’ve outlasted that. Creed’s music is having this resurgence on a global level, so I’m grateful and thankful for that. It’s all water under the bridge, and here we are today talking about Higher Power and what’s on this record.
ESQ: When did you notice Creed’s music coming back into the zeitgeist?
SS: It probably started during Covid, but I was more tuned in to my kids than paying attention to what was going on in the world. But in early 2021, it just started happening. And thank goodness that we’re not somewhere over the rainbow, that we’re here today and I’m talking to you and I’ve got a new album called Higher Power and I’m getting ready to go on tour and go on a Creed tour. I’m just grateful.
ESQ: What do your kids listen to?
SS: Oh man, my daughter’s into everything. Right now she’s a musician. She plays piano, guitar, drums, and she records. She’s recently gone through her Metallica phase, where she’s learned all the Metallica riffs, and then she’s playing scales, then she went on to Nirvana. She’s already learned the Creed songs, or a bunch of them. And then she’s also into a lot of the pop artists. Not only does she like rock and metal, she likes what any seventeen-year-old girl would like, from Taylor Swift to, what’s her name, Sia?
Creed performs on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 1999.
ESQ: SZA.
SS: SZA. From SZA to Taylor Swift and everything in between. And the same with my son. Last night, my son, I guess, stumbled across, or maybe I stumbled across on my phone, an article on SZA and me. And I said, “Son, do you know who this is?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do. I listen to her.” I was like, “Oh, I guess she’s talking about your dad.” He was like, “Really?” It was a cool moment where I got to experience that with my son. Now my little Anthony, he loves his daddy’s music. He wants to get in the car when he’s with me and he wants to hear all the heaviest songs.
ESQ: What was the first music that you listened to that made you want to perform?
SS: I always have to give credit to Def Leppard for the moment that I said, “That’s exactly what I wanna do.” When I saw “Photograph” come on MTV, and saw the video and heard the sound, and I was like, “I wanna be in a rock band, and I wanna have that guy’s life.” But what really had an impact on me prior to that was Neil Diamond. “America” was the song that we would listen to at my buddy’s house over and over again.
ESQ: Creed’s moment in the late nineties and early aughts was right at the time when everything was supposed to be a little bit ironic. I think how a person feels about you and your voice reflects how they feel about sincerity. When I told people I was interviewing you, a lot of them said, “I have been listening to him a lot lately,” which you know is true. And one of those people said, “He’s like the Ted Lasso of rock.” There is something that is sincere and hopeful and honest and unironic that the world kind of needs right now. There’s not really a question there. I’m just wondering if that resonates.
SS: When I create, I’m not trying to be anything other than who I am and express honestly what’s going on inside of me at that time. So it feels good to hear you say that, because that’s at the core of who I am as an artist.
ESQ: You’re touring behind Higher Power, and then there are two Creed Cruises. What’s new about your tour routine now that you’re fifty?
SS: I rest a lot more. I give my body its downtime in order for it to have what it needs to deliver what I deliver onstage.
ESQ: What’s a pleasant surprise about being fifty?
SS: Aside from the occasional aches and pains, I still feel like I’m thirty-five. It’s not what I thought fifty was. Even though I have a five-month-old grandson, fifty doesn’t look like I thought fifty was going to look at all. I realize there’s so much more life ahead of me. You know, just like I say on [Creed’s 1999 song] “Are You Ready?”—“your life has just begun.”
ESQ: What would you tell the younger version of yourself?
SS: Life’s not a party. You know? When you’re doing a show, the people that are there to watch you are coming to have a good time and party. But that’s your job. You need to limit your good times and your blowing off steam and your unwinding to times when you’re not working. There would be a lot of things I would tell young Scott. Have thicker skin; don’t take things so personally. Understand the tongue-in-cheek. And, you know, react and live outside of your emotions. It’s a good place to be when you’re creating, so use it there. But in terms of interpersonal relationships or in terms of just our conversation today, no matter what you ask me, don’t ever respond or react out of emotion. Respond with reason and logic. And I think that promotes longevity in so many areas of your life.
ESQ: Would he have listened? | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 7 | https://letterboxd.com/film/the-gambler-2014/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/empty-poster-1000.231946d0.png",
"https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/empty-poster-230.6b1dabe6.png",
"https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/flags/USA.165ff2bd.svg",
"https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/flags/CAN.bf2c301d.svg",
"https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/flags/USA.165ff2bd.svg",
"... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Literature professor Jim Bennett leads a secret life as a high-stakes gambler. Always a risk-taker, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Staying one step ahead, he pits his creditor against the operator of an illicit gambling ring while garnering the attention of Frank, a paternalistic loan shark. As his relationship with a student deepens, Bennett must risk everything for a second chance. | en | https://letterboxd.com/film/the-gambler-2014/ | the movie is largely a chore until near the end when John Goodman comes out of nowhere looking like Baron Harkonnen & makes an absolute meal out of his five mins of screen time. Its not enough to recommend the full movie, but the scene itself is worth pulling up on youtube.
This movie’s saving grace is that it understands that every member of organized crime is really just some guy who wants to talk at you while you’re forced to sit in silence and drink the most disgusting rum & coke you’ve ever had in your life
I pretty much hated this film.
Reasons why:
* I like Mark Wahlberg as an actor, but he has a limited range. This character WAS NOT in that range. Here he is a freaking novelist turned college English professor. NO. No, no, no, no, no. No. It might be his least believable character since THE HAPPENING. When he was trying to deliver his badass lines in the film all I could see was Dirk DIggler performing the terrible script with his limited acting abilities from the movie-within-a-movie in BOOGIE NIGHTS.
* This script is atrocious! Nearly every line was flat and just idiotic. None of the motivations made any sense, none of the character actions were anything that any real…
Focusing more on the unshakable drive to place one more bet than the crushing melancholy of loss, Rupert Wyatt's "The Gambler" gives a new shine to the age-old tale of ill-fated bettors. Starring Mark Wahlberg as a literature professor with a gaming problem, the film provides sharp drama and engaging characters.
Following Wahlberg's addict as he builds up tremendous debt to feed his habit, "The Gambler" treats its audience to both minor character study and plot-driven drama. Colliding with characters that help and hinder him, the gambler sees his life unravel as his debtors begin to squeeze his very existence.
Wyatt assembles a drama that is sleek and potent enough to lead to something occasionally gripping. Wahlberg creates a character…
First of all I understand that a 4.5 rating for this movie is fairly unique so let me explain myself. I would like to agree that the writing and directing can seem a little disorganized through this movie. A few instances throughout the first time watching this I wasn't able to keep up. Inappropriate relationship with his student, family woes, gambling issues with multiple groups of people, specific students he connects with, former author, and current professor at what seems to be a pretty good school in..... wait where was this filmed? (Couldn't resist looking it up, it's mostly in LA and partially Las Vegas). There's so much to focus on, but at the same time, this film is named…
Not a single, solitary, itty bitty piece of me wants to spend two hours watching a pompous rat bleed out every positive moment in his miserable little life, and that's what I just did.
Mark Wahlberg has some talent. I've enjoyed several of his films in the past, most notably The Departed, The Fighter, and The Other Guys were all vastly enjoyable. For every good movie he's had, he seems to sign on to like 3 more horrendous scripts. Although his acting is great in this...
The behavior his character exhibits is exhausting. I knew a fella very much like him, and we have since parted ways for what are about to very obvious reasons: it's incomparable how self destructive… | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 19 | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_gambler_2015 | en | Rotten Tomatoes | [
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/rtlogo.9b892cff3fd.png",
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-01T00:00:00 | Literature professor Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) leads a secret life as a high-stakes gambler. Always a risk-taker, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Staying one step ahead, he pits his creditor against the operator of an illicit gambling ring while garnering the attention of Frank (John Goodman), a paternalistic loan shark. As his relationship with a student (Brie Larson) deepens, Bennett must risk everything for a second chance. | en | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/favicon.ico | Rotten Tomatoes | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_gambler_2015 | Let's keep in touch!
>
Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:
Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More
Sign me up No thanks | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 35 | https://paramount-pics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler_(2014_film) | en | The Gambler (2014 film) | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180123000816 | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180123000816 | [
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/e/e6/Site-logo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713171552",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/220?cb=20180123000816",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6a181c72-e8bf-419b-b4db-18fd56... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Paramount Pictures Wiki"
] | null | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title character, premiered on November 10, 2014 at the AFI Fest, and was... | en | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/4/4a/Site-favicon.ico/revision/latest?cb=20210911190742 | Paramount Pictures Wiki | https://paramount-pics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler_(2014_film) | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title character, premiered on November 10, 2014 at the AFI Fest, and was theatrically released in the United States on December 25, 2014. It features George Kennedy's final film role before his death in 2016. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 0 | 5 | https://issuu.com/cngnewspapers/docs/ts0122_e01_comp | en | ECDC E Edition Jan. 22, 2015 | [
"https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/31d186ba39f38e8c4fac.png",
"https://static.issuu.com/fe/silkscreen/0.0.3042/icons/gradient/icon-canva-gradient.svg",
"https://static.isu.pub/fe/product-header-frontend/781e53c/1e794a8c4ec65e549678.png",
"https://photo.isu.pub/cngnewspapers/photo_large... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-23T20:58:44+00:00 | Read ECDC E Edition Jan. 22, 2015 by CNG Newspaper Group on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our platform. Start here! | en | /favicon.ico | Issuu | https://issuu.com/cngnewspapers/docs/ts0122_e01_comp | Welcome to Issuu’s blog: home to product news, tips, resources, interviews (and more) related to content marketing and publishing.
Here you'll find an answer to your question. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 74 | https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1282-the-gambler/ | en | The Gambler | [
"https://d2ycltig8jwwee.cloudfront.net/site/svg/locked-icon.svg",
"https://d2ycltig8jwwee.cloudfront.net/site/svg/sidebar-menu-logo.svg",
"https://d2ycltig8jwwee.cloudfront.net/site/svg/locked-icon.svg",
"https://d2ycltig8jwwee.cloudfront.net/reviews/1282/fullwidth.5151a06c.jpg",
"https://d2ycltig8jwwee.clo... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Scott Tobias"
] | null | Mark Wahlberg lays it all on the line in a slick update of a 40-year-old James Toback script directed by Rise Of The Planet Of The Apesâ ... | /favicon.ico | The Dissolve | https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1282-the-gambler/ | Part of being a smart gambler—or even some layperson on a day trip to the casino—is bankroll management, wagering enough that the prospect of losing feels a little uncomfortable, but not so much that every penny is put at risk. There’s no point in betting a tiny amount, because there’s no consequence to winning or losing, and certainly no endorphin rush; betting everything is reckless, because there are no sure things in games of chance, and the house always has favorable odds. Jim Bennett is not a smart gambler. When he struts into an underground casino in The Gambler, he’s not there to socialize, or spend a long evening peeling off a chip stack. He turns every dollar he has into chips, and immediately bets it all on one blackjack hand. And if he’s fortunate enough to win, the entire stack goes back into the middle. And another. And another. His apparent strategy is to ride the heater until he busts the casino, but he’s really expecting to lose. Keep pulling that trigger in Russian Roulette, and it won’t matter if the first five out of six chambers were empty.
The Gambler remakes Karel Reisz’s gritty 1974 film of the same title, which was based on a semi-autobiographical script by the irrepressible James Toback, who went on to write and direct 1978’s Fingers and a number of provocative indies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Two Girls And A Guy, Black & White, and Harvard Man. In a sense, all Toback scripts are autobiographical, because the same themes keep running through them, from broad concerns about masculinity and sex to narrower insights, like how Ivy League basketball is a haven for bookmaking shenanigans. For Paramount, producer-star Mark Wahlberg, writer William Monahan (The Departed), and director Rupert Wyatt (2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes) to choose The Gambler for revival is curious, because the material is so knotted up in Tobackian self-mythology that any adaptation is doomed to look like sock-puppet theater. But Wyatt is a supremely confident filmmaker. His style is multitudes sleeker than Reisz’s original, but his eclectic taste, particularly in the soundtrack, reveals a true connection to the earlier era.
Though James Caan’s buttoned-down swagger in the first film cannot be imitated or equaled, Mark Wahlberg brings dimension to a character caught in a spiral of self-loathing and addiction. After he loses all his money in the opening scene, the film fills in the gaps in Jim’s psychological profile. With the world no longer waiting for him to follow through on his early promise as a novelist, Jim logs time as a college professor, where his contempt for his students grows so acute that he declares all of them but one have no potential whatsoever. The one who does is Amy (Brie Larson), who also happens to moonlight as a casino waitress, which means she knows about his secret habit. The two get involved, but she watches him throw good money after bad to the point where he’s in debt to three people at once: the casino owner (Alvin Ing) and a pair of dangerous lenders played by John Goodman and Michael K. Williams. He turns to his mother Roberta (Jessica Lange) for help, but despite the family’s enormous wealth, she’s loathe to give the deadbeat another dime, even with his life on the line.
Nothing about Jim’s relationship with Amy works, which has little to do with Wahlberg and Larson, and more to do with the fact that women relegated to the girlfriend role in gambling movies tend to be wet blankets. (See also: Gretchen Mol in Rounders, Lauren Hutton in the original Gambler, etc.) And gone is the idea of The Gambler as a means through which the screenwriter can grapple with his own intellect, privilege, compulsions, and existential malaise, since Toback already did that 40 years ago. Those issues are in play within Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett, too, but the new film is more like a salty, superficial homage to an earlier era in American moviemaking than an authentic slice of personal torment.
But surface pleasures are still pleasures, and The Gambler is a consistently entertaining game of chicken Jim plays with his life. Just as the first film had an abundance of wonderful character actors (Paul Sorvino, James Woods, and M. Emmet Walsh, among others), Goodman and Williams, in particular, are given plenty of room to operate, with a shirtless Goodman assuming a sumo-like power in the spa that serves as his base of operations, and Williams effortlessly channeling his badasses on The Wire and Boardwalk Empire. And just the spectacle of watching Jim ask for another card after hitting 18 in blackjack, or staking his life on the turn of a roulette wheel, makes for instant tension. The degenerate is on the knife’s edge—and we’re right there with him. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 23 | https://joethemnmovieman.com/2014/12/25/movie-review-the-gambler/ | en | Movie Review ~ The Gambler (2014) ⋆ The MN Movie Man | [
"https://i0.wp.com/joethemnmovieman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gambler_ver2.jpg?resize=486%2C755&quality=89&ssl=1"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Joe"
] | 2014-12-25T00:00:00 | The Facts: Synopsis: Both an English professor and a high-stakes gambler, Jim Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Stars: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, Michael Kenneth Williams Director: Rupert Wyatt Rated: R Running Length: 111 minutes TMMM Score: (2/10) Review: If […] | en | The MN Movie Man | https://joethemnmovieman.com/2014/12/25/movie-review-the-gambler/ | The Facts:
Synopsis: Both an English professor and a high-stakes gambler, Jim Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral.
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, Michael Kenneth Williams
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Rated: R
Running Length: 111 minutes
TMMM Score: (2/10)
Review: If you must remake a movie, you should at least aim higher than the film you’re giving a new shine to. That’s sage words of advice for any filmmaker but a message those behind The Gambler didn’t pay much attention to. The original 1974 film was no classic but it’s leagues better than this sluggish rethinking that never antes up to the table though it has several aces up its sleeve.
Considering the script from Oscar winning screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) was based on James Toback’s original I was surprised how very different the two movies are. In fact, it may be wrong to call the movie a remake at all because although the structure follows the original in a very rough sense, many other changes have been made that don’t do any favors for anyone involved.
I’m a person that rarely goes to a casino and if I do, if I find myself even $10 up I’m ready to cash out and head home. So it’s particularly frustrating me to watch films like The Gambler where characters can’t resist making that one last bet that obliterates their winnings. It’s a scenario that happens over and over again here and it makes for exhausting viewing.
Mark Wahlberg (Transformers: Age of Extinction) is a floppy haired spoiled rich kid cum failed writer that teaches at a local college and has a nasty gambling habit. Losing a nice chunk of change and borrowing from a gangster (Michael Kenneth Williams, RoboCop) to cover his losses, it isn’t long before he finds himself caught in the middle of the people he owes and having to figure out how to pay them back while keeping all of his appendages intact.
In Monahan’s script, all the women in Wahlberg’s life are either ice queens (Jessica Lange, Cape Fear, drastically underused and over Botox-ed as his chilly mother), moon-faced admirers (Brie Larson, The Spectacular Now), or strippers/prostitutes with little redeeming value. At least in Toback’s original script the women represented some quality he was lacking. Here they have virtually no purpose but to be roadblocks or doormats.
Especially troubling is the storyline that puts a star pupil (Larson) in position to be a love interest for Wahlberg. Possessing no chemistry, the actors go through the embarrassing motions of courtship that culminates in an out of nowhere kiss that had one audience member at my screening exclaim “Are you KIDDING me?”
Between long soliloquies in the classroom setting that show how well Wahlberg can recite dialogue that makes him appear as if he could be a lit scholar and too many visits with a just this side of deadly loan shark (John Goodman, Argo) the film is less than two hours but feels 40 minutes longer than that. Capping off with an eye-roll of a coda, this Gambler doesn’t even deserve a place at your cinematic table. Skip it. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 15 | https://stevehely.com/2018/09/12/the-gambler-2014/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://stevehely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/220px-the_gambler_poster.jpg?w=590",
"https://stevehely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-12-at-2-12-14-pm.png?w=590&h=526",
"https://stevehely.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-12-at-2-14-00-pm.png?w=590&h=390",
"https://1.gr... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/eikbQPldhPY?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent",
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Aw_WmVCNTJU?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent",
"https://www.youtube.com/emb... | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2018-09-12T00:00:00 | Saw this clip on some retweet of this fellow's Twitter. I was struck by the bluntness and concision of the advice the fact that the advice contains a very specific investment strategy down to what funds you should be in (80% VTSAX, 20% VBTLX) the compelling performance of an actor I'd never seen opposite Wahlberg… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Helytimes | https://stevehely.com/2018/09/12/the-gambler-2014/ | Saw this clip on some retweet of this fellow’s Twitter.
I was struck by
the bluntness and concision of the advice
the fact that the advice contains a very specific investment strategy down to what funds you should be in (80% VTSAX, 20% VBTLX)
the compelling performance of an actor I’d never seen opposite Wahlberg (although I’d say it drops off at “that’s your base, get me?”)
It appeared this was from the 2014 film The Gambler
The film is interesting. Mark Wahlberg plays a compulsive gambler and English professor. There are some extended scenes of Wahlberg lecturing his college undergrads on Shakespeare, Camus, and his own self-absorbed theories of literature, failure, and life. The character is obnoxious, self-pitying, logorrheic and somewhat unlikeable as a hero. Nevertheless his most attractive student falls in love with him. William Monahan, who won an Oscar for The Departed, wrote the screenplay. The film itself is a remake of 1974 movie directed by James Toback, in which James Caan plays the Mark Wahlberg role.
Here’s the interesting thing. Watching the 2016 version, I realized the speech I’d seen on Twitter that first caught my attention is different. The actor’s different — in the movie I watched it’s John Goodman.
What happened here? Had they recast the actor or something? The twitterer who put it up is from South Africa, did they release a different version of the movie there?
Did some investigating and found the version I saw was made by this guy, JL Collins, a financial blogger.
Here’s a roundup of his nine basic points for financial independence.
He did a pretty good job as an actor I think! I believe the scene in the movie would be strengthened from the specificity of his advice. And the line about every stiff from the factory stiff to the CEO is working to make you richer is cool, maybe an improvement on the script as filmed. I’ll have to get this guy’s book.
It would make a good commercial for Vanguard.
VTSAX vs S&P 500: | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 0 | 22 | https://filmuforia.com/tag/arthouse/page/3/ | en | Arthouse Archives | [
"https://filmuforia.com/wp-content/themes/eprefix-bootstrap/img/top_logo.svg",
"https://filmuforia.com/wp-content/themes/eprefix-bootstrap/img/top_logo.svg",
"https://filmuforia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Gem-cohen-300x198.jpg",
"https://filmuforia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ASSASSIN_THE_trees_green-c... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | Filmuforia | https://filmuforia.com/tag/arthouse/page/3/ | Here are ten indie films that have stayed in my memory this year. Some were viewed at festivals and are still hoping for a release, others started out as indies (CAROL and AMY) but have rapidly gained cult status and heading for the Oscars.
It’s not a definitive list: many of the films I’ve enjoyed the most this year are from the classics. Martin Scorsese’s Polish selection were my biggest discovery. Some have something new or different to enjoy with every viewing: I’ve changed too in the decades since I first saw them: BARRY LYNDON; THE TENANT and CHINATOWN are three that spring to mind. And there are Comedies that make me laugh again and again: Woody Allen’s SMALL TIME CROOKS and Peter Bogdanovich’s WHAT’S UP DOC. So here are my favourites for 2015 –
COUNTING | Director: Jem Cohen | 111mins Documentary US
‘Sleeping dogs; Waking cats; Straws that break the camel’s back/ The subtle urban portraiture of Jem Cohen’s work could be described as tragi comedy in motion. His recent drama MUSEUM HOURS was a hit amongst the arthouse crowd but COUNTING is a straightforward documentary that explores the peripatetic fillmaker’s wanderings through New York, Moscow, St Petersburg, Istanbul and an unknown city in the Middle East (Islamabad?).
Taking the form of 15 different but interconnected fragments, a lose narrative gradually emerges that points to a World where everyone is in contact but no one is actually engaging; people are talking but no one is listening. So COUNTING feels like an intensely personal take-down of our contemporary cities where animals and people are increasingly bewildered and alienated from their urban surroundings.
Continually leavening his film with ironic commentary that juxtaposes images of alienated people, cats or dogs photographed against the urban landscape often with poignantly amusing signs, his acute observations reflect the state of play in contemporary society. Whether faintly amusing or poignantly sad, they put Terrence Malick’s saccharine Hallmark greetingcard platitudes to shame, making Jem Cohen a unique and inventive director who deserves more acclaim. A treasure not to be missed, but not his best outing. MT. reviewed at BERLINALE 2015
THE ASSASSIN | Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou | Cast: Qi Shu, Chen Chang, Satoshi Tsumabuki | 12omin Taiwanese Drama
Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou has brought a Palme d’Or probable to the Croisette with his stunning drama THE ASSASSIN. This is a serious and sumptuously composed masterpiece – in the true sense of the word. Hou brings a sense of uncompromising formal brilliance to the wuxia material. THE ASSASSIN is a work of spiritual resonance and historical importance, it is also visually orgasmic.
Set during the Tang dynasty, the story opens as a young girl played by Shu Qi undergoes training to be an assassin. But her female sympathies stand in the way of her killing instinct and after failing an important mission, she is sent back to her hometown. Some time later, she is again tasked with killing an important governor (played by Chang Chen) who is questioning the Emperor’s authority. The task involves a moral twist: not only is the governor her cousin, but also her first love.
Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s stunning visuals create a sparkling jewel box in every frame. The magnificent landscape showcase lush forests, mist-filled mountains and precipitous gorges in this remote and the often hostile terrain. But this is not the classic martial arts slasher movie and the killing sprees are spare and discrete. This is the domain of the highly disciplined and spiritually-trained Grandmasters, experienced recently through the work of Wang Ka Wai. But Hou’s martial arts sequences have their own brutal and breathtaking beauty and are nonetheless powerful for their distinct lack of gratuitous blood-letting. There is a serene and graceful delicacy to this filmmaking which is both tear-wellingly beautifully and satisfying austere. A sequence involving black magic is particularly sinister, making THE ASSASSIN a captivating masterpiece in elegance and restraint, holding his head proudly in the starry firmament of Taiwanese filmmaking. MT | REVIEWED AT CANNES 2015
EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT | Director: Ciro Guerra | Cast: Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolivar, Yauenkü Migue | 122min | Adventure Drama | Colombia
Colombian writer|director Ciro Guerra’s third feature is a visually stunning exploration to a heart of darkness that echoes Miguel Gomes’ Tabu or Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde or even Nicolas Roeg’s Belize-set drama of that name.
A backlash on the negative impacts of organised Religion and Colonialism EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT‘s slow-burn intensity has a morose and unsettling undercurrent that threatens to submerge you in the sweaty waters of the Amazon River whence its token German explorer, Theordor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) meanders fitfully in search of a rare and exotic flower with restorative powers.
Impressively mounted and elegantly shot in black and white (by DoP David Gallego) this arthouse masterpiece was dreamt up by scripters Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde, who base this imagined drama, told in parallel narrative, on the diaries of two explorers travelling through the Colombian jungle in the early part of last century between 1900 and the 1940s. Theodor and Evan (Brionne Davis) are guided by the rather fierce figure of a shaman called Karamakate (played by Nilbio Torres and later by Antonio Bolivar) the sole survivor of a native tribe which perished due to invasion.
Karamakate knows the intricate tribal nuances and the subtleties of the local fauna but is filled with latent hatred for the explorers who he blames for destroying his forefathers. Despite this he cures Theodor, virtually bringing him back to life with potions distilled from the vegetation which is alarmingly shot through a pipe at high speed into the German’s nostrils. With the Shaman they encounter a fallen Catholic mission and a poor worker with a severed arm who begs to be put out of his misery.
For all the magnificent beauty of this wildly lush and desolate forest with its flowing river, there are signs of human destruction. EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT scored by Carlos Garcia’s haunting ambient soundtrack this is a peaceful, if slightly overlong, meditation on the havoc man has wreaked on lost humanity and the planet. MT | WINNER OF THE CICAE AWARD AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2015 | CIRO GUERRA
SLEEPING GIANT | Director: Andrew Cividino | 89min Canadian Drama
Andrew Cividino lampoons and laments the male of the species in his piquant and delightfully-observed rites of passage debut feature, SLEEPING GIANT. Making great use of the magnificent ‘big country’ landscapes of his native Ontario, Cividino is another starlight trouper from the fabulous galaxy of contemporary Canadian filmmakers. This is a teen drama with surprisingly universal appeal that will appeal to the arthouse crowd of all age-groups.
Quietly incisive yet monumentally moving, SLEEPING GIANT explores the angst-ridden adolescent awakening of three teenage boys who joke and jossle together one sun-drenched summer in Lake Superior, that starts predictably bright but ends in a dark and frightening place. A razor-sharp script is matched with cutting-edge performances from newcomers Jackson Martin as Adam, Riley (Reece Moffett) and Nate (Nick Serine).
Adam is a thoughtful, intelligent boy with a face as pure as milk. Spending the summer with his parents in their luxurious lakeside cabin, he strikes up a friendship with hell-raiser cousins Riley and Nate that soon starts to challenge his perceptions of his parent’s marriage and his discrete upbringing. As they steadily bait him into joining them on shoplifting and drinking bouts, they also encourage him to abuse the trust of local girl, who Adam takes a liking to. Outwardly, it feels as if Adam is unable to rise to the challenge of these young male bullies but the perceptive Adam is slowly biding his time.
As the narrative unfurls amidst the impressive lakeside landscapes, an ominous score signals a sense shift in tone towards of unease in this unassuming coming of ager, which on the surface looks like any other glossy teen flick. And as the boys’ friendship deepens and they jockey for supremacy, so the cracks and resentments start to appear. Nate, in particularly, becomes more vituperative and vindictive as we get to know him, constantly provoking Adam’s masculinity and whilst Adam stays surprisingly calm, he is quietly formulating an informed impression of the situation. Clearly a budding psychopath, Nate masks his insecurity with typically violent outbursts where he hits a dead bird repeatedly with a stick and burns a mating beatle to death. All this is lushly observed in James Klopko’s inventive cinematography that brilliantly evokes the joy and excitement of teenage years in those long lost summers of our childhood.
But these boys are not the only ones playing fast and loose. It emerges that Adam’s father, a deliberately uncool David Disher, is also indulging in some naughty behaviour that could ruin his cosy family summer for good. And when Adam wises up to his father’s behaviour, a subtle inter-generational power-play is added to the sparky dynamic of this holiday crowd.
This is very much a film that focuses on how male selfishness and need for dominance effects the females in their entourage. SLEEPING GIANT develops from a upbeat character-driven piece to one with significant and sinister psychological punch where Cividino demonstrates a masterful control his material and cast in engaging drama that never outstays its welcome with a startling finale. MT | reviewed at CANNES 2015 CRITICS’ WEEK
LISTEN TO ME MARLON | Director: Steven Riley | 95min | Documentary | US
A shady enigmatic figure with a gruff exterior is how most of us remember Marlon Brando in his later years (1924-2004). But Steven Riley redresses the balance with this intoxicating documentary compiled from reams of Brando’s own audio tapes recording his innermost thoughts and streams of consciousness that expose the icon’s soul for all to appreciate. It’s unlikely that Marlon would approve of this exposé, commissioned by his own estate. That said, it serves as a remarkable tribute to the screen legend and, for the most part, manages to enhance his his profile rather than diminish it; a decade after his death.
The film opens with a spooky digitised 3D image of Marlon’s head that the actor created for posterity – rather like some people commission a bronze bust or painting. It sets the tone for the woozy narrative that seems to capture the essence of the Marlon, often drifting dreamlike through filmed footage, clips and photographs of this stunningly handsome screen idol with his velvety voice, ‘come to bed’ eyes and macho persona.
It tells how from an early age Marlon was close to his creatively driven mother but wary of his father; a travelling salesman who drank and beat his family. Marlon’s early influences came from acting superstar Stella Adler at New York’s, ‘New Schoo’l, a theatre and film training establishment run by talented, intellectual Jewish immigrés. Marlon drifted into acting because he had a talent for ‘lying’: he was the youngest actor to win an Oscar for On the Waterfront, which he felt was undeserved. He later boycotted his Oscar for The Godfather, sending an American Indian to receive it in protest for the portrayal of the US Native race in Hollywood. His looks and allure made him popular with women although he was a poor father figure to the children whose birth he acknowledged: his daughter Cheyenne Brando later committed suicide; his son Christopher killed her boyfriend. There were many others.
But this did not tarnish his earning ability and he was much sought after often commanding vast figures for his acting performances which later left him free to pursue his human rights patronage of Black and Native American causes. A deep thinker and an introvert who isolated himself in the Hollywood Hills and in his beloved Tahiti, LISTEN TO ME MARLON brings out his philosophical edge and his spiritual leanings. He also took his craft seriously, realising his gift was the making of him: “I arrived in New York with holes in my socks, and holes in my mind”. During his lifetime he formed close friendships with other realist actors such as Monty Clift, but on set he was never easy to direct and had contretemps with Trevor Howard during Mutiny on the Bounty and Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now.
Shot through with insights and musings about life and his acting, it emerges that Marlon never took his fame for granted but also yearned for a simpler existence in Tahiti: “A sanity and sense of reality is taken away from you by Success”. MT | REVIEWED AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2015
SON OF SAUL | Director: László Nemes | Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnar, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Sandor Zsoter. | 107min Wartime Drama Hungary
László Nemes learnt his craft under the legendary Hungarian director, Bela Tarr. His feature debut is a shocking and claustrophobic thriller exploring the little known lives of the Sonderkommando, Jews who were forced, under pain of death, to clean up the gas chambers during the final days of Auschwitz in 1944.
Clearly, Nemes is an inventive talent in the making. His restless camera tells a secret and conspiratorial story in pin-sharp close-up while in the background, out-of-focus atrocities are seen unfolding in the Nazi concentration camp and its surroundings. The action focuses on Saul (Géza Röhrig), a man whose mission is to herd his own people into massive ovens and lock them in as their pitiful cries and raging emerges.
One boy survives the onslaught, but is subsequently suffocated by a German officer. Saul appears to recognise him as his own son and sets off in desperation to find a Rabbi to say prayers and bury him according to the Jewish faith. A constant whispering and bartering in going on before our eyes, and while Saul is bribing his fellow inmates with golden and precious personal effects (from the dead) jewellery, an escape plan is also brewing.
But unlike his master of slow-motion, Nemes offers up a fast-moving and disorientating action thriller. Sometimes the camera is behind his shoulder focusing on the chattering and internal conspiracy between the inmates, others it focuses on the background, where German officers bait and bully the Sonderkommandos. Dead bodies are dragged by and thrown onto trucks in blurry, soft-focus. In one scene, at entire battle is going on in the hazy distance, where prisoners are being shot and forced into open burial pits as fires rage and gunfire rings out. It feels as it Nemes is running two contemporaneous film sets; one in the foreground and one of horrific slaughter and anihilation in the near distance. There is a remarkable single take, in pristine focus, where Saul carries the body of his “son” into a river and swims to the other side.
This is a work of supreme craftsmanship but also a harrowing and devastating tribute to the Sonderkommandos, who knew their lives would also end in slaughter, when their job was done and Géza Röhrig’s performance rings of both subtle defiance and acceptance. The final scene seems to allow a chink of light and hope into this dreadful darkness, as his face lights up into a gradual smile in the middle of a verdant forest.
SON OF SAUL serves as a positive revival of the Holocaust with other recent films such as Night Will Fall and Shoah.
THE BEST OF ENEMIES | Directors: Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon | 87min Documentary US
In THE BEST OF ENEMIES Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon showcase the heavyweight intellectual TV sparring matches between William Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, who offered their subjectivity on American Politics during 1968 and fro the last few decades of the 20th Century. Whether or not you agreed with their politics these wittily-crafted debates and well-reasoned arguments, spoken in cool patrician vowels, had US viewers pinned to their sets night after night from the late sixties until the nineties.
Best known for their musical biopics, Neville and Gordon take us on a rip-roaring ride through the lives of both men who had the American public hanging on their every word. Millions of viewers were fixated on their TVs each night, as Buckley, an ardent Republican and Vidal, a champagne socialist, expounded their views like an elegant game of Centre Court tennis. At a time when America needed to “change lanes”, the debates allowed a refreshing breeze of clarity to blow through the political landscape, but culminated in a famous exchange during news coverage of a convention in Chicago (1968), where Buckley finally puts his cards on the table during a highly-charged debate that went down in American history.
Multi-lingual William H Buckley Jr was a staunch Catholic from an educated New York family who went to Yale and spent the Winters in a chateau in Gstaad or sailing at his Stamford holiday home. Gore Vidal, seen posing in his romantic Italian coastal villa, was also from a privileged background with political connections although he never went to University, going straight into the Army, as did Buckley after Yale. The two went on to publish books and newspaper articles – Vidal becoming the best-selling author of the controversial sex-change novel “Myra Breckinridge” – Buckley set up his right-wing journal National Review and became the host of a NewsNight-style programme called The Firing Line. The two were polar opposites and would argue that black was white just to affirm their antipathy of one another. We also hear off-scene readings from John Lithgow (as Vidal) and Kelsey Grammer (as Buckley) and the late Christopher Hitchens’ adds his commentary further enhancing and inform our enjoyment of this immersive piece.
Slowly ramping up the tension as their gripping story unfolds, Neville and Gordon reveal that ABC-TV, lagging third in the news division behind CBS and NBS, had decided to up its game by hiring these sworn enemies to host a talk show during a convention in Miami. Grainy footage of these coruscating debates make gripping viewing as they each appraise the political situation of an American Society in crisis. When the debates reconvened in Chicago, the tone became more venomous between the men, reflecting a mood of hostility and social unrest that descended on the town at the height of the anti-Vietnam War, in a draconian Police presence. Theatrical texture is added with footage of Paul Newman and Arthur Miller who were also in town at the time. Discussion of the riots seeps into the coverage as these cool intellectuals lock horns, Vidal calling Buckley “a crypto-Nazi.” Rising to the occasion, Buckley is seen gurning with hatred – and the image is repeated several times – as he barks back “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.”
When seen on video footage, Buckley was clearly devastated at having lost his cool and apologized profusely but Vidal is strangely unphased with an icy coolness that is itself unnerving given the hatred he clearly felt. Vicious law suits zapped back and forth like angry hornets between the two men for years afterwards, as they each endeavoured to work through this televised trauma.
Ultimately, Gordon and Neville’s documentary serves to illustrate how Buckley and Vidal were the last to deliver stimulating debates of intellectual clarity on television. Nowadays, networks resort to “that which is highly viewable rather than that which is illuminating”. What a shame. MT
EVERY SECRET THING | Director: Amy Berg, Writer: Nicole Holofcener | Cast: Diane Lane, Dakota Fanning, Elizabeth Banks, Danielle MacDonald, Nate Parker |99min Psychodrama | Mystery | US
Oscar-nominated Amy Berg brings her documentary expertise (West of Memphis | Deliver Us From Evil ) to bear in this feature debut that makes an interesting pairing with her documentary Prophet’s Prey, also screening at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival and touching on similar issues. Although initially challenged by its slightly bewildering fractured narrative taking place in two different time lines – the past and the present in quick succession – the overtly sombre-toned psychological drama, based on Laura Lippman’s best-seller, goes on to exert a relentlessly unsettling grip throughout its 93 minute running time. This is largely down to four remarkable female performances: Elizabeth Banks, Diane Lane, Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald.
Ronnie and Alice, (played as adults by Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald, respectively) are suspected of kidnapping two mixed-race kids in separate incidents a decade apart. We join the story as an investigation into the latest disappearance is taking place in contempo New York state. And gradually we discover more about the initial crime which resulted in the girls being incarcerated for 10 years until they emerge as women in their late teens. Told through flashbacks to plausible but mock newspaper footage and news bulletins, the original murder is relayed from the perspective of the young girls, as the real story only emerges in the final stages of the movie.
Skilful edits require intense concentration as we bring our instincts to the forefront in analysing the characters of the girls and their families and so as to determine the upshot of a saga of female disturbance and deception fraught with many different possibilities, twists and turns. Berg casts aspersions at a dreadful early childhood for both Alice and Ronnie but the circumstances surrounding their start in life that lead them to become, in effect, psychopaths, is always shrouded in mystery. Even at the finale, there is no way of knowing exactly who initiated the kidnapping or who committed the murder although it is possible to make an educated guess, based on our own experience and intuitions. There is also the element of false memory that makes this a very exciting and challenging drama, particularly from a feminine perspective.
Themes of parenting; bullying; adoption and the break-down on the family unit and its affects on female relationships – not to mention issues of re-integration into the community – are all carefully woven into the narrative and seen from each different female’s perspective. Rob Hardy’s stunning cinematography incorporates inventive camera angles and a haunting original score from Robin Coudert (Populaire).
Diane Lane is superb as a single mother who appears to be grappling with parenting a difficult daughter whom she is also in competition with as a woman. Dakota Fanning is mesmerising; particularly in one scene where she chillingly appears both vulnerable and cunning. But Danielle MacDonald gives the most spine-chilling turn as a narcissistic fantasist with body image issues. And last, but not least, Elizabeth Banks plays an award-winning detective tasked with investigating the case and bringing her own psychological insight into this nest of vipers. You will have a field day!. MT | REVIEWED AT EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL | 17 -28 JUNE 2015.
CAROL | Director: Todd Haynes | Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler | Drama | US
Patricia Highsmith’s novels make striking thrillers: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley and The Two Faces of January have become screen classics. The eagerly-awaited CAROL, which premieres at Cannes, is a perfect screen adaptation of one of her more romantic stories. Two remarkable performances, by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who picked up the Best Actress award, make CAROL particularly enjoyable. They play elegant fifties women caught in the seductive embrace of a lesbian relationship. Todd Haynes’ lush and leisurely adaptation of The Price of Salt, which was seen as rather daring at the time, now seems rather coy and kittenish, although Blanchett certainly wears the trousers in both her heterosexual marriage and an outré lesbian flutter. This is a luxuriously affair that unfolds rather tentatively during Christmas 1952 in a snowy New York heralding the Eisenhower era.
Phyllis Nagy’s clever screenplay clings close to the page while conjuring up the younger woman’s profession as photography rather than theatre set direction. It also retains the open, rather positive ending of Highsmith’s novel. The story opens in a New York department store (akin to Bloomingdales). Mara plays the young Therese Belivet who is meets Carol Aird – a creamy, mink-wrapped Blanchett – buying Christmas presents for her little girl, Rindy. A perfect excuse for further contact is provided when Carol leaves her gloves on the counter, and later invites the gamine-like Therese to her turreted New Jersey home. But the two finally meet in town over eggs and martinis. A chemistry of sorts develops through the velvety visuals of Ed Lachman’s camerawork (he shot in 16ml and blew the images up to look like 35ml) and Haynes’ competent direction – they worked together on Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven – so you get the picture.
Carol’s successful businessman husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), is seeking a divorce due to her previous affair with her childhood friend Abby (Sarah Paulson) but he still loves his wife and threatens to get custody of Rindy. But Carol’s mind is made up and she pursues Therese with masculine determination in a highly seductive role made all the more teasing in the rather languid pacing that takes in a multitude of changes in her gorgeous couture wardrobe (Sandy Powell excels in her designs). The two finally end up in a tastefully soft-focused, semi-nude embrace in Waterloo, Iowa, and Carol acknowledges the bathos of this location.
But their crime (and it was a crime in 1952) is captured on camera by a travelling ‘notions’ salesman and Carol swiftly extricates herself from the relationship. Blanchett plays her Carol as a woman of infinite breeding and stylish charm, occasionally looking down her nose but always with a witty grace. Mara is more cutely foxy with those exotic, piercing eyes. The delux experience is gift-wrapped in soigné sets and and an atmospheric period score from Carter Burwell. MT
Rooney Mara won Best Actress for her role at Cannes 2015 | The Golden Frog apAward for Best Cinematography (Ed Lachman) at the prestigious Camerimage Awards 2015 | REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 13 -24 MAY 2015 | CAROL | IN COMPETITION | CANNES 2015
[youtube id=”aopRIEs6P5A” width=”600″ height=”350″]
FRANCOFONIA | Director| Writer | Director Alexandr Sokurov | Cast: Louis-Do de Lencquessaing, Vincent Nemeth, Benjamin Utzerath, Johanna Krthals Altes | 87min | Docudrama | Russia | Fr Germany| Neth | 2015
In a festival which oscillated between the mediocre and the banal, Sukurov once again reminds us what cinema could be: an intellectual tour-de-force of documentary, essay and feature: as such, FRANCOFONIA towers above all the other efforts so far.
FRANCOFONIA is foremost a film about German-French relationships on a mostly cultural level; the director calling the link between the two nations “sisterly” which is an unusual word to use considering the many wars they fought with each other – unless he is hinting at sibling rivalry here. The star is certainly The Louvre where the two protagonists: the French director of the museum, Jacques Jaujard (Lencquesaing), and the German officer, Count Franziskus Wolff Metternich (Utzerath), in charge of cultural affairs for the German occupiers, fought in a low-key manner between 1940 and 1942. Metternich was then recalled to Germany not having given in to the Nazi leadership whose main aim was to steal the art treasures – a task they managed successfully later. Jaujard, who worked for the French Resistance, could rely on Metternich for help, a favour which was returned after the end of WWII, when Metternich needed help for the de-Nazification trial. But in the two years, Metternich, a Nazi Party Member since 1933 was civil while trying to delay the art robbery of his superiors, like a good Nazi.
In the summer of 1940 it was clear to the M Jaujard that his Museum was in danger, haunted by the spectre of Germany as the French government surrenders and the German army arrives in force. Archive footage of the era shows Hitler casting his beady eye over the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees, desperately looking for the Louvre and its treasures.
Fortuitously the perspicacious M Jaujard, the museum director, has taken precautionary measures and does not flee his museum when Count Wolff-Metternich, the officer commanded by Hitler to supervise France’s art collection for the Nazis, arrives at the Louvre to find its most important works have vanished. Jaujard has had them moved to Chateaux hundreds of miles away in preparation for the German bombings – and Metternich – who made the same wise moves in Germany – thus protects the French patrimony from the thieving hands of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. In this ‘sisterly’ way Jaujard (a suave Louis Do de Lencquesaing) and Metternich (a suitably aristocratic-looking Benjamin Utzerath) are bought together with their love and appreciation of Art.
Marianne, the typical French heroine who chants “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and self-obsessed Napoleon – who points to himself in paintings around the walls – are the ghosts who haunt the Louvre in their traditional costumes. Napoleon claims that his sole purpose of waging war was to raid countries for their art treasures. And Sokurov takes us on a guided tour of these treasures, marking out the particular European propensity for portrait painting, enabling us to identify ourselves hundreds of years ago. Something that, he points out, the Muslims didn’t do. The Mona Lisa is given the most attention, with her enigmatic smile.
Often the director is seen sitting in his office, talking to a sea Captain on a ‘ship to shore’ computer link. The ship is bearing artworks and clearly many thousands have been lost at the bottom of the sea during their transportation around the globe, by trophy-taking warlords.
FRANCOFONIA is the first Sukurov film which shines a positive light on the Soviet Union. Bruno Delbonnel’s breathtaking cinematography successfully recreates the wartime effort in Paris, and the extensive archive material gives so much information and philosophcal debate that one viewing cannot do justice to this masterpiece. This is a film to savour. MT/AS
Stephen Mayne caught up with Mya Taylor and Sean Baker during the UK Premiere of TANGERINE at this BFI London Film Festival
Capturing the moment is exciting but it comes at a price. That much is evident when I walk into the room at the Mayfair Hotel to meet Sean Baker and Mya Taylor, director/writer and co-star respectively of breakout US indie hit Tangerine. Mya, elegant despite the strain of endless media engagements is commenting on her schedule for the day: “23 interviews, 2 photos shoots and 3 Q&As right?” She turns to Sean, a slender figure dressed in black, for confirmation. He’s on his way out as he answers: “I don’t know but suddenly my bladder is about to burst. Can you start and I’ll be right back?”
With TANGERINE making its bow at the 59th London Film Festival in the evening, I’m the 15th journalist wheeled in front of them already and its only lunchtime. They bear me graciously, even if Mya only acquiesces to Sean’s brief absence on the proviso I don’t ask any dull questions along the lines of how she met him. Incidentally, he discovered her at an LGBT centre around the corner from the notorious Red Light district of the Santa Monica and Highland intersection presented in the film. Not that I asked of course!
From the streets of LA, she now faces different challenges. Having to work through the same repetitive questions clearly takes a toll for a start. “Journalists ask the same shit over and over and over. Like I just answered this shit, it’s in magazines. Why don’t you just read about it and put it in your interview.” She can turn on the charm when she needs to though. “Actually, you English people are so much cleverer with your questions. You guys are smarter than Americans.”
The furore around TANGERINE is both a surprise and somehow expected given the growing prominence of transgender issues in the mainstream media this year. The film follows two transgender prostitutes, played by Mya and Kitana Kiki Rodriquez, as they wander the streets of LA on Christmas Eve dealing with a collection of quirky characters during the course of the day. Shot on iPhones with a hyper-real feel and an impressive soundtrack, it’s high tempo, energetic madness that proves utterly irresistible. Don’t just take my word for it. Magnolia Pictures who snapped up world distribution rights at Sundance in January are even planning an Oscar push for Mya and Kitana, which would make them the first transgender actresses to receive nominations if all goes to plan.
Academy award glamour is a far cry from the world presented in the film, as Mya knows only too well after moving to LA at 18. “I used to be in that world. I couldn’t do much with my life even though I was trying. And now I’m an actress and known everywhere and I’m in a totally different life.” She sounds amazed but it has been kind of amazing. She’s also clear her past is a way of life she’s happy to leave behind. “It’s something you want to be away from, I guess because it’s so miserable. There was a time when I was homeless and I had to sleep inside men’s sex clubs. There’s a risk of a man trying to touch you and have sex with you. You’re trying to sleep and there’s loud music playing and people having sex everywhere. It’s nasty.”
Sleeping inside sex clubs isn’t even the worst option. “There was one time that I slept behind a dumpster because I didn’t want to be bothered. I thought the police would probably come if I was on the sidewalk. But it was so uncomfortable that other times I’d stay up all night and walk around and sleep inside the youth centre the next day. I’d get like four or five hours of sleep a day.”
At the mention of youth centres, I wonder whether there are more options now available to help people stuck in Mya’s former situation. The answer is mixed. Mya feels LA offers the most help of anywhere she’s been, but youth centres don’t address all the problems. “Think about this; if I’m up all night and I go to the centre the next day to sleep, my whole day is gone right there. You can’t accomplish anything because you’re trying to sleep. It’s the same cycle every day for a lot of the transgender girls.” Even when they can find somewhere to catch up on sleep, discrimination is never far away. “When transgender girls do actually go interview for jobs they get turned down because they’re trans. I just went to get my ID changed to say my gender is female. It will be finalised next August [we’re in October 2015 now]. Let’s say I go to an interview and have to give them my documentation. If they see I’m trans I won’t get hired. That’s just how it has been. Whether you’re pretty or passable, if that information isn’t changed, or if they just know you’re trans, you won’t get hired. The best thing to try and do is live stealth so nobody knows.”
There is hope that change is coming at last. Sean seems upbeat over what he’s seen. The 44 year old filmmaker, a stalwart of the indie scene after four previous features and a gloriously odd puppet sitcom Greg the Bunny threw himself into Mya’s old world when developing TANGERINE and still keeps tabs on it. He seems excited that the LGBT centre where he first discovered her now has a department dedicated to transgender people. “I think they’re doing a whole employment thing. It seems with the recent awareness that existing foundations are putting targets in place to help trans people.”
This awareness is partly why TANGERINE has drawn such notice. Aside from being rather good, it’s currently riding a wave of interest in transgender issues. But will it last or are we witnessing a well-meaning flash in the pan? Mya is unequivocal. “It’s the start of something. This something isn’t going to fade.” Sean’s equally adamant. “It’s a movement not a fad. All I know is when I started hearing the general public talking about trans issues and the fact that in the US the most generic mainstream poppy radio stations are talking about it, you know it’s broken into the mainstream. It’s an issue that has reached this point in the zeitgeist where it’s on everybody’s minds. When we set down this road two and a half years ago it must have been brewing. I thought we were the only ones thinking about it but that’s obviously not true.”
Sean credits three major events in the US that have helped to turn the tide. “You have Obama using the word transgender in a presidential address, you have Laverne Cox [star of Orange is the New Black] on the cover of Time, and you have Caitlyn [Jenner], the biggest celebrity to go through a transition publicly.”
With all this in mind, I ask what they expected when they set out on the film in 2013. Surely the excitement generated by TANGERINE must have come as a surprise. For Sean he just saw it as a chance to make another film following the release of Starlet, his fourth feature, in 2012. “I couldn’t get funding for a bigger film and was desperate to make another movie right away. I remember Mark [Duplass, executive producer of TANGERINE and established director /actor in his own right] had offered me this micro-budget thing if I wanted. It was a real step back as usually you want to increase your budget and this was less than half my previous film. It was when we got the thumbs up from Mark and started doing our research that we took it seriously hoping it would be a recognised indie that would travel the world. Getting to Cannes, Venice or Berlin, that’s the whole goal for me anyway.”
For Mya, considering where she came from and where she now is, it’s been so much more. Barring a one-off appearance as a zombie in a small TV series in 2010 this is her acting debut. From the LA of TANGERINE she’s sitting in London just days after Magnolia’s Oscar push announcement. Tired as she is, she’s clearly having a ball. “It’s my first time in London and I love it. I want to move here and get a house. I think I’m going to buy Buckingham Palace.” A note of realism does creep in. “That place is priceless though; I don’t even think Donald Trump could afford it.” I doubt she would want to be responsible for kicking the Queen out anyway. After a constitutional detour we establish Her Majesty’s ceremonial role much to Mya’s amusement. “So the Queen just happens to be very rich and luxurious and gorgeous at an old age? I love her.”
As for what’s next, who knows. Mya is certainly very sanguine about it. “I don’t really put too much expectation on my future; I just go with the flow. That’s all I have to say.” Very much in keeping with the film really.
TANGERINE IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 NOVEMBER NATIONWIDE
Britain’s best-loved, independent cinema organisation, EALING STUDIOS, produced a dazzling array of comedies and noirish dramas during the 1940s and 50s, adding a rich vein of provocative and subversive films to the British film canon, some of them surprisingly radical in their implications.
The Studios has a unique place in the history of British cinema and has become a byword for a certain type of British whimsy and eccentricity but it also pioneered the underdog spirit, producing some tough, cynical and challenging portraits of British life. During the War years, Ealing produced romantic features that roused the British public during the War effort and the studio’s films boasted a surprising variety of characters from all walks of life. Many of these now rank among the undisputed cult classics of British cinema, among them Dead of Night, The Blue Lamp, The Cruel Sea, The Man in the White Suit and Passport to Pimlico. There are many other worthwhile features that have been unseen or inaccessible for decades.
IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947) Set over a single 24-hour period in postwar Bethnal Green, Robert Hamer’s noir-ish thriller was Ealing Studios’ first popular success and it widely considered one of the greatest achievements of British Cinema of the last 1940s.
Ealing was presided over by Michael Balcon, a towering figure in British cinema who was an early supporter of Alfred Hitchcock. He gathered around him a band of talented collaborators including the very influential Braziilian Cavalcanti brothers and directors Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden and Alexander McKendrick. Battling against competition and a certain hostility from the major studios of Rank and the American giant Hammer he successfully ran Ealing for more than 20 years.
Today Ealing Studios is the oldest working film studio in the world and the only British studio that produces and distributes feature films as well as providing facilities. It recently joined forces with leading film financier Prescience, co-formed in 2005 by Paul Brett and Tim Smith, to create the new one-stop international sales company ‘Ealing Metro’. Prescience uniquely positions Ealing Metro as an international sales and distribution company that can deliver an integrated solution for filmmakers. Through Prescience and its Aegis Film Fund, Ealing Metro works with independent producers to help develop and finance product so that, along with Ealing Studios’ own productions, it can market and sell a unique and growing slate in the international marketplace.
The theme of Ealing: Light & Dark is a rich and revealing one. Even the renowned comedies have a dark side within them: Kind Hearts and Coronets is a wittily immoral tale of a serial killer in pursuit of a dukedom; Whisky Galore! has a mischievous approach to law and order as a Scottish island population attempt to beat the Customs men to the free whisky washed ashore from a shipwreck.
Part of the enduring appeal of Ealing is its witty challenging of authority in films such as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, which touched a nerve with audiences eager for social and political change faced with the austerity of the immediate post-war era.
Beyond the apparent frothy entertainment, Ealing’s darker side dares to show wartime failures, imagine the threat of invasion or to contemplate the unsavoury after-effects of the war in the subtly supernatural The Ship That Died of Shame or the European noir Cage of Gold, in which Jean Simmons is lured by the charms of an homme fatal. Another pan-European story, Secret People (featuring an early appearance for Audrey Hepburn), contemplates the ethics of assassination, while in Frieda, Mai Zetterling faces anti-German prejudice in a small English town.
The posters for Ealing Studios films feature artwork by many of the era’s greatest artists including John Piper, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Edward Ardizzone and Mervyn Peake, while the acting talent is a roll-call of many of Britain’s greatest performers, among them Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford, Joan Greenwood, Dennis Price, Jean Simmons, Googie Withers, Michael Redgave, John Mills, Thora Hird, Diana Dors, James Fox, Virginia McKenna, Herbert Lom, Maggie Smith, Jack Warner, Alastair Sim, Will Hay and many more.
E A L I N G F I L M N O I R
NEXT OF KIN
UK 1942. Dir Thorold Dickinson. With Mervyn Johns, Guy Mas, Basil Radford,
Nova Pilbeam, Thora Hird. 102min
Ealing’s first major artistic triumph for the war effort, Next of Kin is a cautionary tale about careless talk and the scourge of fifth columnists at large in the UK. The film’s sober tone marked a change in war propaganda for Ealing, whose earlier blind celebration of military prowess gives way to an authentic depiction of the dangers and sacrifices faced by the wartime nation. Plus All Hands (UK 1941. Dir John Paddy Carstairs. 9min) a MoI short that warns of the dangers of careless talk in the navy.
WENT THE DAY WELL? UK 1942.
Dir Alberto Cavalcanti. With Leslie Banks, Basil Sydney, Frank Lawton, Elizabeth Allan. 93min. PG
In the middle of World War II Cavalcanti provocatively imagined a postwar England in which the failure of the threatened German invasion could be safely seen in flashback, thanks to the resourceful villagers of Bramley End. Once the ostensibly British troops in their village are revealed as Nazis, and the local squire as a fifth columnist, the community unites and fights back with startling ferocity. A call to arms as persuasive as Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
DEAD OF NIGHT
UK 1945. Dir Alberto Cavalcanti. With Googie Withers, Mervyn Johns, Michael Ralph, Michael Redgrave. 102min
Straying from more familiar realist fare, Dead of Night was Ealing’s only venture into the horror genre. The film recounts five supernatural tales, held together by a linking story which itself has a creepy conclusion – a forerunner to the anthology films that flourished in the early 1970s. The film’s nightmarish world of haunted mirrors and ghostly hearses lingers long after the closing credits, with Michael Redgrave’s performance as a crazed ventriloquist proving particularly unsettling.
PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX
UK 1945. Dir Robert Hamer. With Googie Withers, Mervyn Johns, Gordon Jackson, Sally Ann Howes. 89min. PG
Two worlds collide in this melodrama set in Victorian Brighton: a repressive household, run by a tyrannical chemist, and a sleazy tavern, presided over by a passionate landlady. The chemist’s son (Jackson) finds himself, understandably enough, in thrall to the landlady (Withers). His naïve passion and rebellious feelings against his father lead him into a murder plot from which he barely escapes, prompting a very equivocal happy ending.
FRIEDA
UK 1947. Dir. Basil Dearden. With David Farrar, Glynis Johns, Mai Zetterling, Flor Robson. 98min. PG
Telling the story of a family trying to make sense of a postwar world, Frieda asks the question, ‘Does a good German exist?’ There isn’t one simple answer but many, represented by the varying reactions of the inhabitants of the English village of Denfield when a German refugee arrives as the wife of one of their war heroes. In her first British film, Zetterling portrays Frieda sympathetically but the film allows the audience to reach its own conclusion over her individual responsibility for the horrors of war.
SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS
UK 1948. Dir Basil Dearden. With Joan Greenwood, Stewart Granger, Peter Bull,Flora Robson. 96min. U
In this rare excursion for Ealing into historical drama, Bull and Greenwood are perfectly cast as the dissolute Prince George-Louis and his reluctant bride Sophie-Dorothea. Shooting in colour for the first time allowed the studio to give full rein to the period costumes and sets (the latter were nominated for an Oscar). The design provides an evocative backdrop to the princess’s tragic story. As her lover, Granger shows why he was soon poached by Hollywood, his stature and looks making him the perfect screen hero.
WHISKY GALORE!
UK 1949. With Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Wylie Watson, Bruce Seaton,
Gordon Jackson. 82min. PG
Mackendrick’s glorious debut was the second of the trio of 1949 films that defined Ealing Comedy. When the whisky-parched Todday islanders spy salvation in the form of a shipwreck and 50,000 contraband cases, first they must outwit the morally upstanding English home guard Captain Waggett. One in the eye for puritan English priggishness and a joyous salute to the transformative power of a ‘wee dram’ – or ‘the longest unsponsoredadvertisement ever to reach cinema screens the world over,’ as producer Monja Danischewsky put it.
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS
UK 1949. Dir Robert Hamer. With Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood,
Valerie Hobson. 106min. U
Even Hitchcock couldn’t make murder this much fun. Hamer’s ageless classic challenges The Ladykillers for the title of Ealing’s blackest comedy (call it a score draw, though Kind Hearts has the higher body count). Near perfect script and direction are crowned by wondrous performances. History tends to remember Guinness’s virtuoso turn as all seven members of the lofty, aristocratic D’Ascoynes. But it’s really Price’s film: as the D’Ascoynes’ ruthless nemesis Louis he gives us surely the screen’s wittiest and most charming psychopath.
CAGE OF GOLD
UK 1950. Dir Basil Dearden. With Jean Simmons, David Farrer, James Donald,
Herbert Lom. 83min. PG
Simmons’s only film for Ealing is an unfairly neglected slice of Euro-noir, built upon the (apparently) un-Ealing foundations of passion, infidelity and blackmail. Simmons is a nice, middle-class girl with a nice, steady fiancé who is enticed to the dark side by the return of an old flame. The film flits between cosy suburbia and a vivid Parisian demi-monde, and if the conclusion inevitably opts for safety, the alternative is painted with relish, and Farrer, as ever, makes an appealing rogue.
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT
UK 1951. Dir. Alexander McKendrick. With Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough,Ernest Thesiger. 85min. U
Mackendrick’s plague-on-all-your houses industrial satire may be the most cynical Ealing film of all. Guinness delivers his most complex comic performance as the unworldly genius Sidney, whose invention of an indestructible, dirt-proof fabric terrifies textile barons and trade unions alike. A parable of the inexorability of technological progress and the tyranny of vested interests – with some sly sexual politics thrown in – it’s as acerbic a piece of social commentary as ever escaped from Ealing.
SECRET PEOPLE
UK 1952. Dir Thorold Dickinson. With Valentina Cortese, Serge Reggiani, Charles
Goldner. 96min. PG
An untypical Ealing film, drawing on Dickinson’s own Spanish Civil War experiences. Maria (Cortese), orphaned in London, is a hesitant revolutionary enlisted by her lover to assassinate her country’s fascist leader, the man responsible for her father’s death. Compelling and strikingly inventive, Secret People upset contemporary critics for its apparent indecision, but today it seems an intriguing study of a moral dilemma, with engaging performances from its Italian leads and a notable early role for young Audrey Hepburn.
MANDY
UK 1952. With Phyllis Calvert, Jack Hawkins, Terence Morgan, Mandy Miller,
Edward Chapman. 93min. PG
In this rare Ealing tearjerker, Calvert and Morgan play a couple who disagree about how best to help their deaf child; their relationship is strained further when they become pawns in a political situation at a special school. The story is presented largely from the female point of view and Calvert gives an exceptionally moving performance as the mother torn between her husband and her child. Mandy never succumbs to mawkishness, approaching the subject with sensitivity and reason.
THE CRUEL SEA
UK 1952. Dir Charles Frend. With Virginia McKenna, Stanley Baker. 126min
The ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, as experienced by the captain and first
lieutenant of an anti-submarine convoy escort. Based on Nicholas
Monsarrat’s novel, Ealing’s most popular war film celebrates the commitment and bravery of the British naval forces but isn’t afraid to engage with the harsh realities of combat. Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden lend British grit to the military spectacle and claustrophobic tension, depicting those men shaped and permanently shadowed by the war.
THE MAGGIE
UK 1954. With Paul Douglas, Alex Mackenzie, Abe Barker, Tommy Kearins,
Hubert Gregg. 92min. U
An unsentimental counterpart to Ealing’s The Titfield Thunderbolt, with the latter’s vintage steam train crewed by high-spirited amateurs replaced by a ramshackle ‘puffer’ boat and its gnarly old skipper. The devious MacTaggart cheats his way to the commission to transport a US businessman’s cargo – the first in a series of indignities heaped on his hapless client. The Maggie pits wealth and modernity against heritage and intransigence in a gleeful subversion of Ealing’s ‘small versus big’ convention.
THE SHIP THAT DIED OF SHAME
UK 1955. Dir Basil Dearden. With George Baker, Richard Attenborough, Bill Owen,
Virginia McKenna. 95min
Director Basil Dearden combines sharp thrills with loose social commentary in this tale of Motor Gun Boat 1087 and her once-celebrated officers now turned smugglers. Ealing’s occasional engagement with the supernatural and nostalgia for the war is spun into one of the studio’s darkest and best final films. Richard Attenborough is on form as a crooked chancer making the best out of the bleak social realities of postwar Britain.
NOWWHERE TO GO
UK 1958. Dir Seth Holt. With George Nader, Maggie Smith, Bernard Lee, Bessie
Love. 97min. U
A rare, late excursion into noir for Ealing Studios, scripted by first-time director Holt and critic Ken Tynan. A good-looking ex-con (Nader) coolly robs an old lady of her coin collection, anticipating prison, but also the later recovery of the proceeds. Nothing proves that simple and he discovers the truth of the film’s title. Stylish low-key cinematography, a jazz score and Maggie Smith’s debut performance add to the pleasure.
EALING DRAMAS
THERE AIN’T NO JUSTICE
UK 1939. Dir Penrose Tennyson. With James Hanley, Edward Rigby, Edward Chapman, Mary Clare. 81 min
An aspiring boxer hopes to transcend humble origins and build a name for himself, but comes up against the corruption of the sporting establishment. ‘The film that begs to differ’, announced the publicity for this first film by Ealing’s youngest director, the gifted 25-year-old Pen Tennyson, great-grandson of Lord Alfred. It’s a striking departure from the shallow representation of working-class life in 1930s British films, and the first film to set out recognisably Ealing values: decency, courage and an optimistic faith in humanity and community.
CHEER BOYS CHEER
UK 1939. Dir Walter Forde. With Edmund Gwenn, Peter Coke, Nova Pilbeam, 84 min.
An ‘Ealing comedy’ before its time? Venerable family brewery Greenleaf finds itself under threat from monopolistic industry titan Ironside. But with an unlikely ally in Ironside’s lovelorn scion, plucky little Greenleaf mounts a courageous fightback. Predating Passport to Pimlico and its comic cohort by a decade, this half-forgotten film was an almost uncanny premonition of Ealing delights to come, in its evocation of community, gently progressive values and ‘small v. big’ dynamic. A missing link in the Ealing story, then, but thanks to comedy veteran Forde, a joyous one.
THE BELLS GO DOWN
UK 1943. Dir Basil Dearden. With Philip Friend, Tommy Trinder, James Mason, Mervyn Johns. 90 min.
“In the East End they say London isn’t a town, it’s a group of villages,” begins Dearden’s tribute to the intrepid firefighters confronting the Luftwaffe’s nightly raids. Village London is a very Ealing conception: the vast, anonymous city reduced to a more human scale. But The Bells Go Down is no mere sentimental homily. Its community has its share of divisions, petty squabbles and criminality, but these fade in the face of a common enemy and the stoic endurance of routine tragedy. An inspiring companion piece to Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started.
SAN DEMETRIO LONDON
UK 1943. Dir Charles Frend. With Ralph Michael, Walter Fitzgerald, Robert Beatty, Gordon Jackson. 104 min.
In 1940 the oil tanker San Demetrio, half torn apart by U-boat torpedoes but still somehow afloat, was valiantly rescued by a handful of its crew and steered home through treacherous Atlantic waters. Frend’s admirable second feature takes a true story of wartime heroism and, without sensationalism or triumphalism, shapes it into something approaching national myth (the damaged but defiant ship stands for Britain, the crew a people united by determination, courage and democratic values). It’s Ealing’s most potent and inspiring fusion of propaganda, documentary and people’s war ideals.
THEY CAME TO A CITY
UK 1944. Dir Basil Dearden. With Googie Withers, John Clements, Raymond Huntley, Renée Gadd. 78 min.
This most unusual of Ealing’s features has long been hard to see and is now in a new digital transfer. A fantastical allegory from the pen of J.B. Priestley, it transports nine disparate Britons to a mysterious city. What they find there is, according to their class and disposition, either an earthly paradise of peace and equality or a hell starved of ambition and riches. A film once dismissed as naïve and uncinematic, it has more recently been viewed as a striking expression of its era’s most utopian impulse.
THE BLUE LAMP
UK 1950. Dir Basil Dearden. With Jack Warner, Dirk Bogarde, James Hanley, Peggy Evans. 82 min.
Ealing’s defining contribution to the police procedural genre – with ex-policeman T.E.B. Clarke’s script lending authenticity – sits on the border between the studio’s dark and light sides. There’s tragedy at its core, and a portrait of snarling, lawless youth (a mesmerising young Dirk Bogarde) that’s tough for its time, not least for Ealing. But if it takes us to dark places, its conclusion expresses an irrepressibly optimistic and comforting vision of the ability of society to overcome its most hostile elements.
THE PROUD VALLEY
UK 1940. Dir Pen Tennyson. With Paul Robeson, Simon Lack, Edward Chapman, Janet Johnson. 77 min.
An American seaman is welcomed into a Welsh mining village and bolsters a community facing industrial decline and the tremors of war. Paul Robeson brings warmth, integrity and powerful bass tones to his role as David Goliath, the figure around whom the struggling miners unite and discover their own proud voices. Pen Tennyson directs this simple story with compassion, beauty and dignity to make The Proud Valley one of the most satisfying of early Balcon-era Ealing.
THE HALFWAY HOUSE
UK 1944. Dir Basil Dearden. With Mervyn Johns, Francoise Rosay, Glynis Johns, Esmond Knight. 96 min.
Towards the end of the war, Ealing films took a positive turn and The Halfway House uses a ghostly setting to look towards a future in which wartime problems such as black marketeering, broken relationships and mourning for lost ones are left behind. A disparate group of people find themselves at a remote inn in the Welsh valleys which turns out not to be quite what it seems. A fine ensemble cast balances the film’s humour with its more serious undertones and the supernatural atmosphere is reinforced by a haunting score.
THE OVERLANDERS
UK 1946. Dir Harry Watt.
With Chips Rafferty, Daphne Campbell, John Fernside, John Nugent Hayward, Peter Pagan. 91 min.
A band of Australian drovers, led by Dan McAlpine (Chips Rafferty), drive 1000 cattle across the harsh Northern Territory to fresh pastures in Brisbane. Ealing’s first Australian production is a stellar tribute to the country’s WWII scorched earth defence against the Japanese. Rafferty embraces the sprit of defiance that characterised a nation under threat of invasion, while director Harry Watt brings a documentary sensibility that celebrates the sheer ambition and vast achievement of the drive.
HUE AND CRY
UK 1946. Dir Charles Crichton. With Harry Fowler, Jack Warner, Alastair Sim 82 min Script: T E B Clarke
In the first of the EALING COMEDIES, Harry Fowler leads the ‘Blood and Thunder Boys’, a group of adolescents who discover their favourite boys-own magazine is being used by criminals to plan robberies. Largely acknowledged as the first in Ealing’s cycle of post-war comedies, Hue and Cry gives us a joyfully chaotic of the kind of English eccentrics which would come to characterise the later films. Alistair Sim and Jack Warner are the old hands whose exaggerated performances lead a cast of mostly newcomers.
SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
UK 1948. Dir Charles Frend. With John Mills, Kenneth More, John Gregson, James Roberston Justice. 109 min.
Michael Balcon’s self-confessed preference was for tales of adventure and derring-do and Scott fits the bill perfectly. The British spirit of endeavour and determination, even to the point of foolhardiness, pervades the film, as Scott’s expedition gets ever closer to failure. Filming in Technicolor was an interesting choice given the bleak locations but the scenery is captured exquisitely and offers a dramatic backdrop to the exploits of the party. Vaughan Williams’ score heightens the drama so poignantly enacted by Mills and the rest of the sterling cast.
PASSPORT TO PIMLICO
UK 1949. Dir Henry Cornelius. With Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford, Jane Hylton, Paul Dupuis. 84 min.
A group of Pimlico residents discover that they are in fact citizens of the Duchy of Burgundy, a change of nationality that offers them the opportunity to dodge post-war strictures. Tearing up their ration books, they embark on self-governance but soon find that, despite all its problems, Blighty is the best place to be. Cornelius’s only directing credit for Ealing (though he went on to success with Genevieve), Passport to Pimlico is perhaps the studio’s most joyous celebration of Britishness.
THE MAGNET
UK 1950. Dir Charles Frend. With William Fox, Stephen Murray, Kay Walsh, Meredith Edwards. 79 min.
James Fox, (credited here as William) plays Johnny, a 10-year-old who tricks a younger boy into giving him a toy magnet. Feeling guilty over his deception Johnny anonymously offers the magnet to auction, but when it raises raise enough funds to buy a life saving piece of hospital equipment he is nowhere to be found. A comedy of childhood errors, The Magnet pokes fun at a cosy adult world made insensible by the fantasies of some of its younger inhabitants. Ealing regulars Gladys Henson, Thora Hird and a disguised James Robertson Justice provide support.
THE LADYKILLERS
UK 1955. With Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker, Peter Sellers, Danny
Green, Katie Johnson. 97min. U
Everyone’s favourite knockabout black comedy caper – or a political fable with the ‘ladykillers’ as the incoming post-war Labour government and the little old ladies as the obstacles of Conservative tradition? Beyond any doubt The Ladykillers is the last great Ealing comedy, and the studio’s final production before its sale to the BBC.American screenwriter William Rose apparently dreamed up the plot overnight, but casting, script, production design, and the Technicolor camerawork combine effortlessly for the blackest of farces.
Rivalling Kind Hearts and Coronets for the gleeful blackness of its humour. Posing as an amateur string quintet while planning a robbery at Kings Cross, an ill-assorted group of crooks led by the sinister Professor Marcus (Guinness) rent rooms from a sweet little old lady (Johnson). Despite a few setbacks, the Professor’s plan works superbly. But there’s one factor he hasn’t allowed for… At 77, veteran bit-part player Johnson all but walks off with the film.
THE LAVENDER HILL MOB
UK 1951. Dir Charles Crichton. With Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sidney James, Alfie Bass. 78 min.
Ealing’s theme of the ‘little man fighting back’ finds its culmination here, as upstanding citizens Guinness and Holloway turn to crime, hooking up with two small time crooks to form a gang of unlikely gold smugglers. The heroes’ dreams of freeing themselves from wage slavery in a grey, bombed out London have us rooting for them against the inept police pursuit. Writer T. E. B. Clarke’s comic observations are spot on; he creates a postwar Britain in which demure-looking little old ladies devour American detective fiction with relish.
THE TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT
UK 1952. Dir Charles Crichton. With Stanley Holloway, George Relph, John Gregson, Hugh Griffith, Sid James. 87 min.
The commuters of Titfield form an amateur rail company when they discover that their local branch line is to close. Despite physical opposition from a rival bus company, the train enthusiasts unite behind their eccentric village vicar (Relph) and his affable drunk benefactor (Holloway), to bumble their way to an operators licence. Perhaps the archetype of ‘Ealing Light’ Crichton’s gentle and nostalgic film was also the studio’s first made in colour.
Many of these films are available on DVD/Blu atand HUE and CRY, THE LADYKILLERS, THE MAGNET are re-released by STUDIO CANAL in June\July 2015
FILMUFORIA spoke to Viggo Mortensen about his role in Lisandro Alonso’s existential drama JAUJA, which won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes 2014.
Viggo Mortensen (VM): JAUJA sounded like a good story and knowing that it would be told by Lisandro Alonso, I knew that it would be very unique. I’d seen some of his movies before accepting the role and I thought that the ingredients of it, at least at the start – a father goes looking in Indian territory for his adolescent daughter – was a classic start to an adventure story. And the fact that it would be shot by Lisandro Alonso and Timo Salminen, the cinematographer, I knew it would have a special look and a very original treatment of the landscape and the people within it. So it just seemed like the kind of movie I’d go and see.
Lisandro said in an interview that he wanted to pull you into a labyrinth that you couldn’t escape from…
VM: I didn’t think of it that way. It’s not so much the landscape or the events that happen – the landscape is the landscape, the things that happen that my character can’t explain or can’t find a logical answer to, the way the movie veers out of linear time, the changes in landscapes, the mystery of where his daughter’s gone, some of the things he hears and sees. I’m drawn to those things, I’m drawn to stories that challenge your way of thinking, that make you wake up in the middle of the night and question everything, your preconceived ideas about how life works, how you behave, what your attitudes are about everything and that’s something that I really enjoyed, just in reading the script but also as we were doing it, I thought that was an important thing and if he’s imprisoned it’s not by exterior things, it’s by his own preconceived notions. You know, he puts on his uniform which always worked in Denmark, let’s say, that’s the way he would deal with the situation and he goes out looking and he’s always – even the first conversation you see him have with this Argentine military officer, he’s asking lots of questions, he wants to know what things are called, what is the sequence of events, when can I expect to see this happen. He has, I guess, a Northern European perspective or world view and he tries to impose that, even if it’s he’s not aware that he’s doing it all the time, he’s imposing that on him, in a place and in situations where it doesn’t really work. But he stubbornly keeps doing it, as we tend to do. ‘There must be a reason for this, I’m going to stubbornly find out.’ So he’s probably imprisoned by his own limitations, not so much by the landscape. The trap is within himself, or within his own mind.
I understand you were involved with the music in the film? Can you talk about that?
VM: This is Lisandro’s fifth movie and he did a lot of new things here. I mentioned the cinematographer, who looked at the landscape and lit it in a way that was very different from the way the type of Argentine cinematographer Lisandro had worked with before would have done. But it’s also the first time that he worked with professional actors. The script, for him, is sort of wordy – you know there’s not a lot of dialogue in the movie, but there’s more dialogue in this movie probably than there is in all four previous movies put together. Music, he’s never had a conventional music soundtrack before. If you’ve heard any music in his previous movies it would have been because it would have happened organically, coming out of radio or something. It was something that he tried – we were already part way through shooting and he said, ‘I think that that scene is one of the more important ones, I mean there’s a lot of entering and coming out of dreams, a lot of transitions in the movie. It takes seeing it two or three times before you see all of these moments from the first scene where the daughter sort of grabs my arm once I give her the answer she wants about getting a dog. She closes her eyes and never opens them again for the rest of the scene and I think that’s the first dream and by the end of the story you don’t know if we’re being dreamed or if the characters are all dreams or if it’s the dog’s dream or the girl’s dream. In a way, it doesn’t matter, it’s just what it stimulates when you’re watching it. But the music was something that he decided, ‘That transition is important, that night where he falls asleep under the stars, holding the daughter’s toy soldier because the next day he wakes up and the landscape, the weather, everything is changed, everything is different and he doesn’t realize at that point that he starts charging out – maybe he never fully realizes it in this story. But time has changed, also. So he thought it was important to help that transition with music?, which surprised me, because I knew he didn’t usually do that. And I said, ‘Well, what kind of music? I mean we have limitations and we don’t have any budget – what are we going to do?’ He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be period – I’d rather it wasn’t period specific music’, but he described something with guitar, something that was lyrical and had a certain feel. And so I said, ‘Well, I have worked with and known for many years a very good guitar player named Buckethead, he’s a genius really and we’d record a lot of things, sometimes they have a lyrical quality that sounds like what you’re describing, I can send you some of these tracks and see what you think’. I didn’t think any more of it and then he said, ‘Well, I like this one a lot, I want to use this one, it’s perfect in terms of the time it lasts for that section. And then he said, ‘I like this other one too, because it has a circular structure that would work at the end, that would fit, actually, with the credits really well and it would mirror what’s happening with the story’ and I said, ‘Great, fine’. So that’s how that happened, it was unexpected, I would have never imagined I was going to be providing music for a movie – music is something I do for fun. I mean, I take it seriously, but this was never something I would have thought of, especially on a movie like this.
You have a producer credit on the film too. Has that creative influence that you’ve had over the film, affected the way you’ve performed on camera too, or the way you think about the film?
VM: I hope not. I don’t think so. I mean every movie that I do, I always try to do my job. There’s nothing wrong with just preparing your lines, showing up, doing them and leaving and maybe having no interest in what anyone else is doing. But for me, from my way of doing things, I can’t help but be interested in what other people are doing. As a photographer, I’m interested in what the cinematographer does, how he lights, how he frames shots. I’m interested in the director’s point of view. I’m trying to help him get across his vision, basically and I like to work with other actors and see what happens. I’m interested in the costumes, I’m interested in all aspects of it. As a producer I have more of, I guess, an established or a legal right to intercede in the filmmaker’s behalf, to protect his vision, which is what I’m trying to do anyway, I think, as a collaborator. Just practical things like, ‘Well, let’s make sure that the subtitles are correct, and they have to be right, whether it’s in Spanish or French or Danish. The poster – I just want the director to be happy and have the movie he wants, to be able to shoot it the way he wants, to be able to edit it the way he wants, and present it the way he sees it. That’s all that’s about, but it doesn’t really affect the way I perform.
Were you involved in the location shooting?
VM: I wasn’t involved with that. Lisandro sent me pictures during his scouting period – he drove thousands and thousands of miles, all over the country, looking for these places and he was very careful about selecting them. It was interesting to see his process, discarding some and finally settling on others. But those were his choices, and good ones, I think.
Did the location shooting present any particular challenges?
VM: I suppose just comfort, but the group of people that made this movie, including me, it wasn’t a big deal to not have internet or not have phone service, or in some cases a hotel or something. It was part of the story and we knew that going in because of the remote areas we were filming in. I mean, logistics, yeah, getting equipment to certain places sometimes was tricky but we travelled light, we had one camera, I guess we had a small crew, so we made it work.
You touched on the multi-lingual nature of the movie previously. I don’t know if American-Danish is something you agree with as a label, but whether you appreciate that sort of cross-cultural mismatch between different people in the film.
VM: Well I was raised in Argentina and some people there mistakenly think I’m an Argentine actor. I guess you could say I’m an Argentine actor – I’ve been in two Argentine movies, speaking Spanish, in this case with a Danish accent. I don’t know – I may be more drawn to stories that have to do with that, but I’m not conscious of it. I don’t look at the budget or the language or the nationality, or even the genre of the movie when I’m looking for work or hoping something finds me. It’s really if it’s a story I think is interesting. you know I mean I was also in a movie that will be coming out soon called Far From Men, which is a movie that was shot in North Africa in French in Arabic and that’s not something I was setting out to do or would have ever expected I’d do but it’s a great story and I want to be part of it.
Can I just quickly ask about Timo (the cinematographer), because I’ve seen you talk about his Finnish sense of humor and some of the jokes that he pulled that you appreciated.
VM: At the start, I mean Argentines, generally speaking, there’s all kinds of people, just like there are everywhere. And every country in the world these days, especially Europe or almost anywhere is made up of all kinds of sensibilities and languages and points of view and races, even though if you listen to Marie Le Pen or UKIP or something you’d think that wasn’t true, but it is true, whether they like it or not. So generally speaking, I think that the crew, the first few days they were not sure what to make of him and Lisandro even asked me, ‘Is there something wrong with him? I said, No’, he said, ‘Why is he so sad?’ and I said, ‘He’s not sad, he’s just Finnish’. He was just, you know, standing by the sea, looking at the sky. I guess then I looked at it in terms of Argentines would more say what’s on their mind and there’s a different kind of energy and he was very still and very quiet. He didn’t hardly speak at all. He’s very efficient, doing his job, but to me he was just a guy from Finland looking at the sea, waiting for the Argentines to get their shit together so he could shoot the scene. That was all that was going on, there was nothing else going on. And even the first few days, occasionally he would say something and I might be the only person that might laugh, because they wouldn’t even realise he was telling a joke because he was so dry but after a few days they understood each other perfectly and it was great, it was a great combination and it was great to see their interaction and what can happen when you have an open mind. Both on his side and on their side, it was a really good experience for everyone.
What’s your perception of the film, now that it’s on release?
VM: I thought it would be an interesting movie but it turned out better than I could have hoped. And the reception, the reaction to it, particularly from critics who usually would only write about more mainstream type movies, in North America and Europe and elsewhere, has been incredibly positive. I think it’s maybe the best, overall the best reviewed movie I’ve ever been in, including maybe even Lord of the Rings and the Cronenberg movies. It’s incredible. I’m really pleased, but I am, to be honest, surprised. I didn’t expect that. When we showed the movie at Cannes, I felt it would probably go over well there, I didn’t know that the movie would win the Firpresci Prize for Best Movie and all that. In that place I thought, well, yeah, he’s been there before and this is probably a movie that’s a little more accessible and it probably will do well. But beyond that, at the time, I said to him, ‘Well, you know, when it’s shown in North America and Great Britain, other places, you may get savaged by the critics. They may just say, ‘Well, this is nonsense, I don’t know what’s going on here, I don’t understand anything, it’s too slow, etc, etc’. And that’s not been the case. Almost always it’s been well reviewed, by all kinds of newspapers.
Has your own understanding of what the film’s about evolved, from first reading the script to acting in it and now seeing the final film?
VM: I’m still working it out. I’m still working out what the movie’s about [laughs]. And I like those kinds of stories. I like those kinds of directors who tell a story or make something that provokes questions but resists answering the questions. I think Cronenberg is that way as well. I like artists that do that, whether they be poets or painters or musicians or film directors. Each time I’ve seen the movie I’ve seen another layer, usually some other aspect to it. Usually having to do with dreams that start and end with sleep, one dream tying into another until you’re not sure who’s dream it really is. I mean that, you get the first time, but you get it in a more detailed way with each viewing, I find, at least that’s been my experience. I’ve been really pleased – it’s much richer than I expected and I think Lisandrom would say the same thing, that things happen just because he’s was open to allowing them to happen, contributions to be made and chance to play a role. It’s a movie that has a much greater impact and many more layers to it than he would have imagined. I would bet that he would agree with that.
How does working with a director like Lisandro compare with working with Cronenberg?
VM: Not so different. I mean David Cronenberg, on a technical level and a story-telling level is doing something that’s different, but they’re very similar in the sense that they’re calm, friendly presences on the set, they’re not authoritarian, they’re not intolerant. They’re both very secure as people, so that you never get the sense from them that they have this insecure need to make sure everyone is aware at all times, especially in the media, but the crew as well, that every idea, every thing that’s happening is their idea and they control all aspects of the storytelling. They’re more secure than most directors, they’re open to contributions, they’re open to chance playing a role they don’t need to claim authorship of every aspect of what’s going on during the shoot and in the final product. So I find them to be very similar in that regard.
Speaking of Cronenberg, did you enjoy naked wrestling in Eastern Promises as much certain sections of your audience did?
VM: (Laughs). It was pretty uncomfortable, not just the idea of being naked, it was being thrown around on hard tiles. It would probably have been more comfortable if they could have had it be as warm as it should have been, because otherwise there would have been steam on the camera and we wouldn’t have been able to film very well. But no, it was just a scene that had particular physical challenges just to get through it and do the choreography right and obviously since there wasn’t clothing, you couldn’t wear padding and stuff, that was just the nature of it. So it wasn’t enjoyable in that sense, what what was enjoyable, like with any scene, is if the shots worked, and in that case of that particular scene, it was especially enjoyable if the shot worked, because it meant you don’t have to do it again [laughs]. Normally, I’ll do as many takes as you want, I like the process, but with that it was like, ‘Huh, I’m glad we got that, let’s move on’.
Do you have plans to work with Cronenberg again?
VM: Nothing specific, but we always talk about wanting to, so hopefully something will happen.
Is there a particular part you’ve always wanted to play or a dream project you’ve always wanted to get off the ground?
VM: There’s a couple of stories – I’ve written two scripts, I’m writing a third one now and one of those scripts I hope to some day direct. I have ideas for other stories that I think could make movies, but I don’t have one burning ambition in terms of a story or a particular character or anything like that. The same goes for acting – there isn’t a role that I’ve always wanted to play in the theatre or I’ve always wanted to make a movie about. As I say, I kind of try to see what comes my way and I try to pick things that I think I’d like to see, in part because it’s just more fun and then it’s easier to speak with you guys afterwards if it’s something I like, rather than having to find clever ways to avoid talking about something that I know is not very interesting. And also because it just takes a long time if you do it properly. Whether it’s an independent movie or even a very well planned big budget movie that has a start date and a release date and all things are known beforehand, it still takes a long time to prepare something well, to shoot it well and to promote it, so it might as well be something you really find interesting, you know, that you’re not just trying to convince journalists that you find it interesting, but that you actually like.
So, quoting from the film, what is it that makes life function and move forward?
VM: I don’t know. As my character says, I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth asking the question. It’s like saying what makes a perfect movie? Well, there is no way possible to make a perfect movie, it doesn’t exist, there is no such thing as perfect. But striving to make a perfect movie or to even describe what a perfect movie might be – which is also impossible, I think – is worth the effort. It’s like, why do you get out of bed and why do you even bother to brush your teeth or say hello to anyone? And some people opt out, some people commit suicide or otherwise check out, because they don’t feel it’s worthwhile. Why do we read a book? Why do we go to the movies? Why do we ask questions? Why do we answer questions? Because for some reason, we’re curious. We want to know. And some people get very upset when they start to realise as they grow up that there’s a lot of questions, most of them that don’t have definitive answers and that can be very unsettling. But it’s just a process. So I don’t know and I don’t mind not knowing, but I’m still going to keep trying to find out.
You mentioned theatre and obviously Brits are very fond of Danish actors. Would you consider returning to the stage?
VM: Yeah, I’d like to. The last thing I did was in Spain, an Ariel Dorfman play, and I enjoyed the sensation. And I’ve also done some poetry readings, I did one recently there, so that the live audience, the fear and overcoming that fear and connecting with a live audience is a really great feeling and I like that so yeah, sure, I’d like to.
You mentioned the Camus adaptation, Far From Men, earlier. Can you say a little more about what drew you to that?
VM: It’s a great story. He’s one of the writers I most admire, for his art, for his writing, but also his ideas and his stance, his humanist stance. I’ve always admired him or I’ve admired him for a long time and this story – it’s a very short story of his that David Oelhoffen, the writer-director expanded on, but in a very clever way and very true to Camus’ spirit. I liked it as an adventure story, as a relationship story, but I also found it valuable in terms of the thoughts it stimulates about what’s happening now, particularly in the Middle East, but everywhere. How do you get past extremism? In the case of this story, two men who seem so different, so much so that you can’t really see any way that they could be friends, an Arab and a man of European descent, and yet somehow, by going through some difficult experiences together, they do – not in some corny movie way but in a very organic, believable way they come to have some understanding. It doesn’t mean it’s unconditional love between them, but there is an understanding, there’s a rapprochement, there’s a coming together that happens emotionally, mentally between these two people that I thought was a really good story, worth telling and an important story for our times. And I think the director did a really good job with it.
You mentioned your poetry reading and it reminded me that on April Fool’s Day in 2006, you released a CD with your son. I was wondering if that was like a tradition in your family? Do you do April Fool’s jokes in your family?
VM: No, not necessarily. Once in a while, prank calls and so forth. April first has two connotations for me and the one that you are probably are not aware of is more important to me than the actual April Fool’s idea. On April first 1908, a football club named San Lorenzo was established in Argentina and that’s the team I grew up with as a child. So April first, that’s what I think of first.
Speaking of football, I gather you’re a big sports fan in general…
VM: I like to watch sports, particularly I like to watch football, hockey too, in the sense that I think there’s something dramatically interesting about what’s going on. What happens when your back is up against the wall, which I think is the foundation of any interesting drama. What happens when ordinary people are put into extraordinary situations. You know, when you see comebacks like what happened in Paris playing against Chelsea recently, that was a great drama. Watching that, if you like football, that was like watching a great dramatic, intense movie. That game, just because Mourinho’s tactic was, ‘No matter what happens, I cannot lose’ – he was playing not to lose and the other team had nothing to lose and they had ten men instead of eleven. It looked like there was no way that they could win it, but there was something compelling about that drama and the opposing tactics, so yeah, the tactical approaches of each coach. they were dramatically interesting and the combination of the two made for great drama. It doesn’t always work out that way, that the team that really is trying to play attractive attacking football wins. You know, life isn’t fair and sports aren’t fair and it doesn’t work that way, but every once in a while a fairy tale happens before your eyes and it’s fun to watch.
Have you considered playing a footballer in a movie?
VM: No, I’m probably too old to do that at this point anyway. I think it’s a difficult thing to make a good movie about, because there’s so much going on. There’s 22 players, 20 of them are moving constantly, and each move they make, each step they take or each change of direction is for some reason, tactically. It’s a really hard thing to make even an interactive video about. To make a movie about outside of playing has been done okay, I thought The Damned United was interesting, it was pretty good. But I think it’s very difficult to make a compelling drama about what you see. If you’re in a stadium, or watching on TV, it’s difficult to make a movie because there’s so much going on, so much being thought of, and if you’re not used to watching it, you don’t see most of that stuff anyway, but if you’re really into it, you see all that going on and how could you possibly film all that? Why does that guy go here? Why does that guy go there? Or why is that guy angry at the other player because he didn’t go there? There’s so much going on, which is why it’s so great to watch. Matthew Turner.
JAUJA IS IN CINEMAS FROM 10 APRIL 2015 | READ OUR CANNES REVIEW HERE
Andre Simonoveisz spoke to Vanessa Lapa about her documentary on Heinrich Himmler.
F: How did the Heinrich Himmler project first come about?
V.L.: Before the film project, I knew no more than the basics about Heinrich Himmler, nothing about his private life. Neither as a filmmaker or a journalist had I had any dealing in any subject specific of Himmler. In 2006 I was informed by Professor Laor, a psychiatrist at Tel Aviv and Yale University, that the private diaries of Heinrich Himmler had been found. We undertook authentication, to make sure the letters and photos were genuine. Letters and photos had been discovered under the bed of a collector, who might have acquired them either on the Brussels flea market, in LA or from a Mexican couple in the early or mid nineteen sixties.
F: For many years, historians thought, Reinhardt Heydrich was the “brains” behind Himmler, there is even a very interesting book with the title “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich” (Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich). But later, it became clear that Himmler was the real organiser of the Holocaust and other atrocities, and was only answerable to Hitler. Do you agree with that?
V.L.: Yes. Himmler was much more than a “yes-man” he was a thinker. Unlike others, like Eichmann, who “just followed orders”. Himmler gave these orders, well thought them out, and others in the SS were the “processors”.
F.: Do you think, his strict Catholic upbringing had something to do with the political views which he developed very early in his adult life.
V.L.: He was like everybody else, influenced by his upbringing; but he, like everybody else, had choices. But I believe that the cultural influence in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century played they part too. He was a nationalist, dreamer, be believed in myths, not reality. But nothing excuses the choices he made later.
F.: Do you believe that he came to his position as the all powerful Reichsführer SS, only by accident, because he was at the right in the right place. After all, when he joined the SS, there were only 290 SS men, but the SA was a much more powerful organisation, with over 2 million members.
V.L.: A good question. I believe, one goes with the other. With the socio-political situation in Germany at that time, it was possible for a man like Hitler to lead the Nazi movement, but Himmler would have had not the abilities to do so. So, yes, Himmler was in the right position at the time – but Hitler did not have to influence him at all, Himmler found Hitler, but equally, Hitler found Himmler. Himmler did not have to be convinced of anything by Hitler, but, without the rise of the Nazi party to power, Himmler would have never become such a powerful man. Himmler hated everything and everybody who was different from him – from an early age onwards. Even as a child, in his diary, we can find the “older” Himmler. He wrote constantly about Germany’s progress in the war. Most boys of fourteen might write about politics a little in their diaries, but mainly about football and girls. But Himmler did not. It did not took much to make Heinrich Himmler feel at home in nationalist politics in the early thirties in Germany.
F.: Do you think that his ability to compartmentalise, which is really a denial, was greater with Himmler than other Nazi leaders?
V.L.: This is a difficult question to ask. I have worked on this film with historians but also psychiatrist; and looking at his writings, there is something in Heinrich Himmler which is evil beyond comprehension. To believe there are decent ways to kill and that there a good reasons to murder people, this I cannot understand. But he is not the only one, neither past nor present. There are a lot of Himmlers around today and under the right circumstances, it could well turn out like in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. I don’t think that in 1933 or 1935, Hitler or Himmler had any plans for the holocaust, it was a process.
F.: Do you believe that his agricultural studies at university, where they taught him about selection (“Auslese”) of plants and animals, had something to do with his later obsession of “cleansing”?
V.L.: I cannot visualise that his studies had anything to do with the evil he did later. Likewise, to think that so many leading Nazis were vegetarians – even after discussing this with psychiatrists – I am not able to understand this either. How can one mass murder humans, but do not eat meat because not cannot kill an animal? This is a perversion, like Himmler made a perversion of his whole life, being it love, friendship or family. He managed to pervert everything – but I do not think he was Jekyll/Hyde character. Writing to his wife, just before his wedding: “I love you, but there are other things I love more”, and without saying it exactly, he meant killing other humans. This way he deprived his wife and child of love.
F.: But how do you explain that his daughter Gudrun followed her father politically, she was known at the “Nazi Princess” in post war West Germany.
V.L.: I believe, that Gudrun was blinded, and in love with her father, which is normal for a 12 year old, but her decisions as an adult were only her responsibility. Between the ages of 20 and 30, you can form a real picture of your father, still loving him as a father – but, she would have been able, with the help of therapy, perhaps, to see what her father really was and not follow his beliefs as an adult. The problem with Gudrun is that she made choices as an adult. The children of other high-ranking Nazis were also traumatised, but made different choices. Radical choices too, like one of them, who became a Rabbi. This is extreme too, but the children of these parents were psychologically very much damaged.
F: But this “Nazi” mindset in not exclusively a German phenomenon.
V.L. Not, it has happened in other countries, like Russia, Ukraine; Italy too, they were no angels. But the way of execution was a specific German way. I have to grant that. I don’t know if this is a mind set which was there at the time, or is still existent. But overall, this is for me are more global, human problem.
F.: Do you think that HH’s continuous poor health: migraine and violent stomach cramps, were a sign of his body, telling him that he was doing something wrong? We know, his masseur, Kersten, saved many Jews, by only massaging Himmler, when he promised to release Jews.
V.L.: Heinrich Himmler did not believe for a moment, that what he was doing could be wrong, he was absolutely sure that he was right. But I do believe that he was a coward, because in the end he committed suicide, he did not stand up for his deeds. And before that, he was ready to save Jews, but only to save his own life. In trying to negotiate with the Allies for peace, he was not even loyal to Hitler any more in the end. There are many crazy, vicious men, who go through with their conviction to the end, but Heinrich Himmler did not. He betrayed everything he stood for and expected others to do the same.
F.: So, as a last question, would you agree that he was really a very weak person, who got his strength from his position only, but projected his own inferiority complex on others, Jews and homosexuals.
V.L.: Heinrich Himmler was a weak person, he was just above average intelligence. Mainly, he was a small grey, weak bureaucrat, and that is most frightening.
F.: So you would agree with Hannah Arendt and her description of the Nazi leadership as “banality of evil”.
V.L.: No, I don’t agree with that. I very much question now Arendt’s thesis. Firstly, there is a great difference between Eichmann and Himmler. For the latter and many others one can say, that there is no banality in the evil they chose. I see only evil in Himmler; and the danger is, that this evil is accepted by society, when the evil ideology becomes common. But to repeat, this does not make Himmler’s evil banal, in no way.
THE DECENT ONE IS OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 3 April 2014 on Curzon Film World
Eskil Vogt is playing with the essence of cinema. That’s what the slim-looking Norwegian director tells me as we sit for a chat after the London Film Festival screening of his latest, BLIND, which has toured the world since its premiere at the Berlinale 2014. But Vogt also taps into the building-blocks of storytelling in his depiction of blind writer Ingrid, played superbly by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, who toys with our understanding of cinematic narrative as she narrates her own damaged relationship with her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) after recently losing her sight.
EV: Blindness has a long relationship with stories. Just look at the Western canon’s earliest entrant, Homer, who’s frequently represented as blind. Perhaps without sight, fantasy and imagination can run wild. The way we imagine the origins of storytelling, around the fire surrounded by darkness with the flames flickering – you need the unknown around you for the story to work.
F: There’s something nightmarish in the way you presents blindness in the film – as if you were scared of going blind.
EV: It’s strange, people often ask me whether I’d rather be blind or deaf and immediately I say I’d rather be deaf. But when asked by a Norwegian radio station if I’d rather be deaf and lose a right arm, or be blind, I still admit, grudgingly: That’d be harder but I’d still let my right arm go.
F: Wouldn’t you miss, say, music?
EV: You’d get isolated, but I can’t imagine myself without visual intuition. Actually what people are afraid of is change. A deaf person might say ‘How could I not see the face of my lover?’ But I’ve met blind people who’ve said they couldn’t imagine never hearing the sound of their child.
F: What do you think of audio-described performances for the visually impaired?
EV: I was very surprised that blind people like to go to the cinema. Some of them listen to the description and some of them not – it’s too much dialogue, but also they want to experience the original feeling in a way.
F: Like, I suppose, their everyday experience?
EV: They miss some important visual cues, but they prefer that to having the movie descriped to them! We managed to be the first film in Norway to have the film audio-described with smartphones with an app. You download the additional soundtrack and there’s a sound at the beginning of the film – which we can’t hear – that syncs with the smartphone and they have this additional audio description.
F: Could we see that in the UK?
EV: It’d be great if they did this abroad, but they’d have to do the dialogue. It’s more expensive!
F: But you didn’t make the film for blind people.
EV: No, it’s a very visual film. But when we did screenings, blind people had really experienced the film. They ‘saw’ visual details in the film that I couldn’t for the life of me explain how they picked them up. I’m a die-hard film fan, a defender of celluloid and projection. I hate when people watch my movie on computer screen or – god forbid – a smartphone. But when a blind person can understand without seeing, I am less afraid of that technology.
F: On some level, BLIND plays out as an offbeat relationship drama, but how you use blindness creates all sorts of subversive narrative connotations – where did the idea originate?
EV: In the beginning, I thought blindness could be kind of interesting, but I didn’t know why. My first hunch was a blank screen with sound – it would be a cheap movie to make, but wouldn’t be seen much! And more than that, it isn’t true to the experience of blindness. BLIND is about someone who has lost her sight, so she has this visual imagination. Blindness is about these mental images.
F: Blindness can be difficult for sigh | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 2 | https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-gambler | en | The Gambler Movie Review | [
"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_1_1_small.png",
"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_16_9_small.png 350w,/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_16_9_xsmall.png 240w",
"https://w... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jeffrey M. Anderson"
] | 2014-12-17T00:00:00 | Uneven remake makes gambling look dangerous, alluring. Read Common Sense Media's The Gambler review, age rating, and parents guide. | en | /themes/custom/common_sense/images/favicons/favicon-16x16.png | Common Sense Media | https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-gambler | THE GAMBLER is yet another Hollywood remake, and, as usual, it's not as good as the original. In this case, that would be the superior The Gambler (1974), which was directed by Karel Reisz, written by James Toback, and starred James Caan. That movie captured a moment, while the remake merely copies one. Still, taking the new movie all by itself, it does have a certain kind of resonance. And, like the original, it also has something to say about the human condition.
Wahlberg is mesmerizing in the lead role, reckless and assured but helplessly drawn to underworld life -- and at the same time confronting his students with harsh realities about writing. Writer William Monahan (The Departed) crafts a script full of stylized dialogue, giving actors like John Goodman snappy stuff to chew on. And director Rupert Wyatt plunges his characters into a slick-sleazy vision of a gambler's world. In a way, it's more alluring and less profound than the original, but enough of a cautionary tale that it's still worth a look. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 78 | https://nypost.com/2014/12/23/wahlbergs-the-gambler-a-good-bet-for-filmgoers/ | en | Wahlberg’s ‘The Gambler’ a good bet for filmgoers | [
"https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6390601&c3=NYPOST&cj=1&cv=3.6&comscorekw=entertainment",
"https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/02/button_3_bg-2.png?w=206",
"https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/08/kyle-smith3.png?w=76&h=69&crop=1",
"https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y5gPQXbFs9Y?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent"
] | [] | [
"Movies",
"Entertainment",
"brie larson",
"john goodman",
"mark wahlberg",
"movie reviews"
] | null | [
"Kyle Smith"
] | 2014-12-23T00:00:00 | I wish I’d been present at the meeting where someone suggested Mark Wahlberg as a college literature professor steeped in Camus and Shakespeare. Can we also... | en | New York Post | https://nypost.com/2014/12/23/wahlbergs-the-gambler-a-good-bet-for-filmgoers/ | I wish I’d been present at the meeting where someone suggested Mark Wahlberg as a college literature professor steeped in Camus and Shakespeare. Can we also look forward to Michael Cera starring in “The John Wayne Story”? Rosie O’Donnell as Mother Teresa? How about Ben Affleck as Batman? But, no. Now I’m just being absurd.
Wahlberg, disgorging great knowing chunks of campus dialogue (you can tell he’s reaching when his voice gets all high and defensive), redefines the phrase “spectacular miscasting,” but this remake of the 1974 James Caan film written by James Toback still crackles with mordant cynicism.
Professor Wahlberg spends his days telling his writing students they’re all useless, except the one (Brie Larson) upon whom the gods of talent have smiled. At night he hits underground casinos, where his strategy at the blackjack table is to keep betting until cleaned out, then approach local loan sharks for more financing, and repeat.
As I asked when watching Christopher Walken make a career out of playing Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter”: How did this guy manage to stay alive this long? Dispensing with the niceties, the action is boiled down to a single week, which will be the last of the prof’s life unless he delivers a quarter of a million dollars to the two dangerous dudes he owes.
The self-destructing nihilist movie is a favorite subgenre of mine, but the presence of Larson — a floral breeze unexpectedly wafting through one man’s inferno — creates a redemption possibility that means we don’t know exactly what kind of movie we’re watching until the end. While structurally uninteresting, the film is not, then, quite predictable. And thanks to the angular choices of director Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”), who fills the soundtrack with mind-messing stuff like reggae covers of Pink Floyd and a chorus singing Radiohead’s “Creep,” the film feels like a strangely intoxicating dance to the gallows.
Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett, it seems, simply wants to get killed, preferably with a lot of pain. He asks his rich mother (Jessica Lange) for the money, but doesn’t press. He refuses money from another loan shark (John Goodman) because he can’t abide by one condition: that he proclaim, “I am not a man.” Goodman, clad in a towel and encased in a quantity of flesh that would make Jabba the Hutt blanch, lays out the mechanics of the manly need for independence in what will soon be known — must be known! — as the “F - - You” speech.
Dialogue, we seem to have forgotten, matters, and the words — by the brutally funny screenwriter of “The Departed,” William Monahan — are electric eels, slithering and sinister and nasty. They sneak up and sting you, or sometimes tickle your toes. Lowlifes don’t actually talk this way? Yeah. But if only they did. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 80 | https://www.vudu.com/content/browse/details/bundle/1174636%3Ffrom%3Dfnow%26cid%3Dfnowredirect | en | Service is not available in your region. | [
"https://www.vudu.com/content/browse/details/bundle/assets/fah_illustration.svg"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | ./assets/favicon.ico | null | Service is not available in your region. | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 38 | https://movies.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler | en | The Gambler | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/6/62/TheGambler-poster.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20141218192102 | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/6/62/TheGambler-poster.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20141218192102 | [
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/e/e6/Site-logo.png/revision/latest?cb=20230601122650",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/6/62/TheGambler-poster.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/337?cb=20141218192102",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/3/3a/Flag-icon... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Moviepedia"
] | 2024-07-12T14:06:28+00:00 | The Gambler is a crime drama film based on the 1974 film of the same name written by James Toback. It follows a literature professor with a gambling problem who runs afoul of gangsters. Jim Bennett is a risk taker. Both an English professor and a high-stakes gambler, Bennett bets it all when he... | en | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/filmguide/images/4/4a/Site-favicon.ico/revision/latest?cb=20230313154015 | Moviepedia | https://movies.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler | The Gambler is a crime drama film based on the 1974 film of the same name written by James Toback. It follows a literature professor with a gambling problem who runs afoul of gangsters.
Synopsis[]
Jim Bennett is a risk taker. Both an English professor and a high-stakes gambler, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Always one step ahead, Bennett pits his creditor against the operator of a gambling ring and leaves his dysfunctional relationship with his wealthy mother in his wake. He plays both sides, immersing himself in an illicit, underground world while garnering the attention of Frank, a loan shark with a paternal interest in Bennett’s future.
As his relationship with a student deepens, Bennett must take the ultimate risk for a second chance...
Cast[]
Mark Wahlberg as Jim Bennett
John Goodman as Frank
Brie Larson as Amy Phillips
Michael K. Williams as Neville Baraka
Jessica Lange as Roberta
Lamar Kelley as Lamar Allen
Alvin Ing as Lee
Domenick Lombardozzi as Ernie
Emory Cohen as Dexter
Steve Park as Two
Leland Orser as Larry
George Kennedy as Ed
Media[]
Images[] | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 43 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(song) | en | The Gambler (song) | [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/be/The_Gambler_-_Kenny_Roger... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Wikimedia projects"
] | 2006-04-24T07:12:25+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(song) | 1978 single by Kenny Rogers
Not to be confused with Gambler (song).
For other uses, see The Gambler.
"The Gambler"Single by Kenny Rogersfrom the album The Gambler B-side"Momma's Waiting"ReleasedNovember 15, 1978StudioJack Clement Recording (Nashville, Tennessee)GenreCountryLength3:34LabelUnited ArtistsSongwriter(s)Don SchlitzProducer(s)Larry ButlerKenny Rogers singles chronology
"Anyone Who Isn't Me Tonight"
(1978) "The Gambler"
(1978) "All I Ever Need Is You"
(1979)
Music video on YouTube
"The Gambler" is a song written by Don Schlitz and recorded by several artists, most famously by American country singer Kenny Rogers.
Inspiration and early versions
[edit]
Schlitz wrote the song in August 1976 when he was 23 years old. On the American Top 40 radio program of February 3, 1979, Casey Kasem reported that Schlitz said of "The Gambler": "Something more than me wrote that song. I'm convinced of that. I really had no idea where the song was coming from. There was something going through my head, which was my father. It was just a song, and it somehow filtered through me. Six weeks later I received the final verse. Months later it came to me that it was inspired by, and possibly a gift from, my father." Schlitz's father had died in 1976.
Schlitz shopped the song around Nashville for two years before Bobby Bare recorded it on his album Bare at the urging of Shel Silverstein. Bare's version did not catch on and was never released as a single, so Schlitz recorded it himself, but that version failed to chart higher than No. 65. Other musicians took notice and recorded the song in 1978, including Johnny Cash, who put it on his album Gone Girl.
Kenny Rogers version
[edit]
Rogers recorded the song at the Jack Clement Recording Studio in Nashville, Tennessee with producer Larry Butler. Musicians who played on the song included Ray Edenton and Jimmy Capps on acoustic guitar, Pete Drake on pedal steel guitar, Billy Sanford on electric guitar, Jerry Carrigan on drums, Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano, Bob Moore on acoustic bass, Tommy Allsup on the “tic-tac” (baritone) bass guitar, and the Jordanaires and Dottie West (uncredited) on backing vocals.[1]
Released in November 1978 as the title track from Rogers' album The Gambler, this version of the song achieved mainstream success. Rogers' version was a No. 1 country hit, and made its way to the pop charts at a time when country songs rarely crossed over, winning him the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1980.[2]
In 2006, Schlitz featured in Rogers' career retrospective documentary The Journey, in which he praised both Rogers' and producer Larry Butler's contributions to the song, stating "they added several ideas that were not mine, including the new guitar intro".
Content
[edit]
The lyrics describe the song's narrator meeting a gambler one summer evening while riding aimlessly on a train. The gambler can tell from the look on the narrator's face that he is in poor circumstances and offers him advice in exchange for a drink of whisky. After the narrator obliges with the whisky as well as a cigarette, the gambler describes his outlook on life using poker metaphors:
You've got to know when to hold 'em,
know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away,
know when to run.
You never count your money
when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin'
when the dealin's done.
The gambler states that every situation can be played for better or worse. The trick is to recognize what is worth keeping, choose one's battles, and not dwell on losses. After he finishes talking, the gambler crushes the cigarette out, falls asleep, and passes away in the night, leaving the narrator to ponder his wisdom alone.[3]
Chart performance
[edit]
Certifications
[edit]
Legacy
[edit]
The song became Rogers's signature song and most enduring hit. It was one of five consecutive songs by Rogers to hit No. 1 on the Billboard country music charts.[21] On the pop chart, the song made it to No. 16, and No. 3 on the Easy Listening chart.[22] It inspired a series of TV movies loosely inspired by the song and set in the Old West, starting with Kenny Rogers as The Gambler (1980) and followed by Kenny Rogers as The Gambler: The Adventure Continues (1983), Kenny Rogers as The Gambler, Part III: The Legend Continues (1987), The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991), and Gambler V: Playing for Keeps (1994).
As of November 13, 2013, the digital sales of the single stood at 798,000 copies and after all these years the single has yet to be certified gold by RIAA certifications.[23] In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[24] The song was ranked number 18 out of the top 76 songs of the 1970s by Internet radio station WDDF Radio in their 2016 countdown.[25] Following Rogers' death on March 20, 2020, "The Gambler" soared to No. 1 on Billboard's Digital Song Sales chart, followed by "Islands in the Stream", with Dolly Parton, which debuted at No. 2.[26]
In popular culture
[edit]
Sports
[edit]
The Houston Gamblers of the United States Football League, who played in Rogers' hometown, were named after the song.
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Kenny Rogers was nicknamed "The Gambler" after the song, due to sharing a name with the song's artist.
The song is the unofficial 'anthem' for Edinburgh University Men's Hockey Club, where the club are colloquially called "The Gamblers".
The song is used by American Darts player Danny Baggish as his walk-on music as he is nicknamed "The Gambler"
Television
[edit]
In 1979, when Rogers guest-starred in a season 4 episode of The Muppet Show, he performed this song with a Muppet character.[27] Rogers is shown seated on a train with three Muppets, one of them The Gambler (portrayed by Jerry Nelson). Rogers sings the opening verse, while Nelson sings most of The Gambler's dialog, then falls asleep just as Rogers concludes the song's story. After he dies, The Gambler's spirit rises from his Muppet body, singing backup and dances to the song's last two choruses, and lets a deck of cards fly from his hand before fading away.[28]
A caricature parody of Kenny Rogers singing the song appeared in the 1993 Animaniacs Pinky and the Brain short "Bubba Bo Bob Brain" (season 1, episode 34). The lyrics to this version were changed to refer to the children's card game Go Fish: "You gotta know how to cut 'em, know how to shuffle, know how to deal the cards before you play fish with me."
In the series King of the Hill, “The Gambler” is repeatedly shown to be one of lead character Hank Hill's favorite songs.
In the 2007 episode of The Office "Beach Games," Kevin Malone sings the verses of the song in the bus while the rest of the staff joins him for the chorus. This was a nod to Kevin's gambling problem.
In an episode of Monday Night Raw in 2001, The Rock sang the chorus of the song to "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
The song is parodied in a 2023 episode of American Dad!, "The Pink Sphinx Holds Her Hearts on the Turn". Roger claims to be the actual Gambler and that he "fell asleep very very hard" rather than die on the night he met Kenny Rogers, later performing his own version and singing "Kenny Rogers is a liar".
Other
[edit]
Country Yossi parodied the song in the 1980s on his Wanted album as "The Rabbi".[29]
In the 2006 Beaconsfield Mine collapse, trapped miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell sang "The Gambler" together to raise their spirits, as it was the only song they both knew the words and music to.
On July 21, 2009, the song was released for the music game Rock Band as a playable track as part of the "Rock Band Country Track Pack" compilation disc. It was made available via digital download on at the end of 2009.
A 2014 Geico television commercial features Rogers singing part of the song a cappella during a card game, to the displeasure of the other players.
In the 2016 video game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, this happens on one occasion in the game's fifth case: If Apollo Justice presents the wrong evidence, Phoenix recounts something about a gambler singing the first part of the chorus, after which the judge chimes in that he likes the song before singing the rest of the chorus. Apollo, embarrassed, thinks, "I don't know what's worse: the penalty, or their singing."
In Will Smith's movie King Richard, "The Gambler" plays while the Williams family travels across the country to Florida so Venus and Serena can begin training with Rick.
References
[edit] | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 14 | https://rpc3.co/the-gambler-2014/ | en | RPC absolutely loves The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Larson_casino_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Wahlberg_tennis_chair.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Ing_nail_salon_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Goodman_bar_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/co... | [
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2t1dG_Tfg9s?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Q7WmQSjFfls?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jClWqDFaKus?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xg7oHCdJrkE?rel=0"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"R Phillip Castagna"
] | 2020-04-19T10:42:03+00:00 | I had another blog-type of thing before, and, oddly, the writing I had up there that got the most traffic over time was a series of posts I wrote about the 2014 remake of The Gambler... | en | RPC3 | https://rpc3.co/the-gambler-2014/ | Preamble
I had another blog-type of thing before, and, oddly, the writing I had up there that got the most traffic over time was a series of posts I wrote about the 2014 remake of The Gambler, directed by Rupert Wyatt and starring Mark Wahlberg. Each post began exactly the same way, and in the series I tried to lay out the different things I loved about the movie, which got (and still suffers from) absolutely terrible reviews.
Since the content had seemingly found some unknown audience, I decided to go ahead and port it over to this new site. I suspect there's a surprising amount of value in really nailing any given niche, even when it's as tiny as this one.
What was previously a post is now separated within this text with a numbered heading. Little to no edits have been made beyond this reflow-ed structure, however, aside from some essential technical changes that hopefully won't impact anything too much.
Enjoy, and you should definitely watch the film if you haven't yet!
1. Film introduction
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn't the greatest movie ever made.
Don't think there aren't many people who would like to try. At the time of writing the movie stands with a 6/10 rating on IMDB and a truly brutal 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. It seems to have fared about as well as you'd expect it to if it was a film about a well-educated wealthy white male who gambles away both his own fortune and a sizable chunk of his family's—with no apparent remorse whatsoever—only to learn nothing and instead initiate an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student and escape his predicaments through a combination of rigging a sports bet by corrupting a promising athlete into throwing a game and making up the balance with blind luck in an outrageous bet... which is exactly what it is.
Jim Bennett isn't an incredibly sympathetic protagonist. As Frank puts it in the actual movie itself:
Birth, education, intelligence, talent, looks, family, money... has all this been some real comprehensive fucking burden for you?
...And to top it off, the movie is basically entirely talking! When it was (by all appearances) marketed as an action movie!
It's worth plenty.
The fact that the remake of The Gambler was received so poorly might actually make me love it more in some ways.
The thing is, movies are expensive to make.[citation needed] Movies are expensive to make, and the major studios that make them are all divisions of publicly traded corporations that are legally obligated to try to squeeze out whatever money can be found by making them. That means limiting risk, that means making films that internationalize well, that means 3 super hero pseudo-sequels inside a shared cinematic universe every single year. Even all the way from New York, NY, we can see how Hollywood, CA changes when a Fast and the Furious sequel can make $400,000,000 in China alone and suddenly Dwayne Johnson has Jack Nicholson's floor seats for the Lakers.
The Gambler was a risk though. A genuine, honest-to-God risk that didn't even totally pay off. It's unapologetically wordy, entirely based in reality, deals with existential issues, relies on strong but often subtle acting, and has an overall sense of craftsmanship that's hard to find in major studio films. It's niche. To me, the fact that it ended up being unpopular is just a testament to it actually having a vision and not being some focused-grouped-to-hell bullshit. The Gambler takes a stand and was punished for it, but no one can ever pull a Brie Larson and ask its creators "did you make this because you believed in it or because you thought this was what people wanted?"
Wikipedia says The Gambler's director Rupert Wyatt "made his directorial début with the 2008 film The Escapist" before proceeding to actually make money by directing 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes---a classic Sundance-to-riches success story. I think you see a lot of Wyatt's indie sensibilities on display in The Gambler, (a friend of mine once said it's like someone made a Sundance film with a major Hollywood budget,) something which actually ties in well with its thematic content and ethos. After all, "who wants the world at their feet? It's confusing isn't it?"
A classroom full of students who don't give a fuck
The most niche thing about The Gambler (and what I love about it the most) is that it's a movie for creative people. It's for people who feel like they could yell as loud as they want and nobody cares. It culminates in Wahlberg's climactic monologue to Larson, which (personally) didn't just strike close to home for me, it cut straight to my heart:
You know there was a student—just the other day—who said that my problem (if one's nature is a problem, rather than just fucking problematic) is that I see things in terms of victory or death, and not just victory but total victory. It's true. I always have.
I mean it's either victory or don't bother. I mean, the only thing worth doing is the impossible, right? Everything else is fucking grey.
I mean you're born as a man with the nerves of a soldier, the apprehension of an angel, so lift a phrase, but there's no fucking use for it. Here? Where's the use for it? What, you're set to be a philosopher or a king or fucking Shakespeare, and this is all they give you? This? What, twenty-odd years of schooling—which is all instruction in how to be ordinary, or they'll fucking kill you—and they fucking will! ...Y'know, and then it's a career, which is just not the same thing as existence, so...
I want unlimited things. I want everything. I want a real fucking love, a real fucking house, a real fucking thing to do, everyday, and I just... I'd rather die if I don't get it.
In my experience, people tend to diverge sharply on their reaction to that speech. Some people (like me) feel like they can really relate to it... And then there's a large group of other people who are more inclined to say it's one of the craziest things they've ever heard.
There's a quote from an Eddie Huang story that I think speaks to the same kind of perception:
No matter what a stripper tells you, there are two types of people in this world. There are those who take the world at face value, keep the computers putin’, and don’t know to feel otherwise. The other type of person in this world has seen something wicked and the rest of their life is spent reconciling that vision against their existence.
I think that creative mindset (or instinct, or whatever) is both a real thing and only present in a minority of the world's population. A strong majority of people really are fine just "keeping the computers putin'", and it's always tough to genuinely feel different from everyone else around you. To that end, I would say the thing I appreciate most about The Gambler (and the thing I'd always want to bring up first) is that it feels like a genuinely very helpful movie.
It was for me, at least.
2. Aesthetics
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
The first thing I always try to explain about The Gambler is that it's really a movie made for creative people. That's easy to say, but maybe not easy to convince someone of, so let's dig into it a bit more.
Maybe I enjoy the show
I remember the first time I saw the film was at an Alamo Drafthouse in Ashburn, VA—a sleepy neighborhood I didn't know at all, about a 45 minute drive from where I was living at the time. My girlfriend and I would make the trek out for occasional date nights, and I really appreciated how out-of-the-way it felt. The drive back, in particular, would usually be after 1am (late for the DMV, outside of Friday/Saturday night bars and clubs) along a nearly-empty beltway with enough time to let any given movie really sink in.
I remember making this journey back from the theater after the movie, and before I ever thought too much about why the film's themes resonated with me, I just kept thinking about how incredibly striking it was.
In a post-Loving Vincent world the "every frame a painting" adage might feel a little overwrought, but it's hard to find a single camera shot in The Gambler that isn't gorgeous. The cinematography relishes in interesting compositions that the main characters have a small presence in, along with varied, contrasting colors, and a strong sense of the environment for any given scene.
Even within the repeated setting of Jim Bennet's lecture hall, framing and lighting are manipulated to emphasize the warmth between Wahlberg's character and Larson's as well as the shared frustration with the world that connects Jim Bennet and Lamar Allan.
The creative shot composition doesn't just help the movie stand out aesthetically, either. This idea is something I want to revisit later, but all the main characters in the film are singular within their worlds, and the tendency of the movie to minimize their actual form on-screen emphasizes that.
Even in crowded scenes like the casinos, The Gambler prefers to let its main characters fall into the background of obscured shots rather than force a framing where they pop out to the camera more. The creative discipline to it is both unusual and terribly effective.
Seven days
The writing in The Gambler was just as striking to me as its visual aesthetic, and while the monologues are an obvious discussion point here, the creative discipline to some of the dialog is worth mentioning as well. Alvin Ing absolutely crushes his role, for instance, but part of that is capturing a very restrained sense of menace to the elder mobster that is Mr. Lee. His ultimatum to Bennet isn't gratuitous, he just wants his money in seven days... period.
In The Gambler the writing isn't just good in an abstract sense, it's actually good screenplay writing that gives the actors room to bring in their own energy. It might not be obvious why "I don't fucking want to do that shit" is a great line, but that's only when you haven't seen Michael Williams destroy the screen with it:
Of course, the other part of what makes the movie's writing so great are the times when it does simply go in, no holds barred. Goodman's last monologue is a great example of that—it's funny and clever while also being incredibly brazen and insensitive in a way that an actual mobster would be.
Got by talent, imagine that
I think some of what I appreciate as craftsmanship is exactly what kept The Gambler niche. What's "striking" to me feels overblown or even melodramatic to other people. Which is fine. I aim to be a man for all seasons, not all things to all people, and I appreciate others—and especially works of art—that do the same.
The sense of of a determined aesthetic present in the movie, though, is something that I think is indisputable. People might wish it pursued something different with the same enthusiasm, but the creative drive can't be waved away.
I think for creative people, though, the drive to bring a creative vision to life without compromise—regardless of what that vision actually is—is more respectable than anything else. In every field, professionals recognize other professionals before any other judgements, and The Gambler is unabashedly artsy in a way that people of the same make can empathize with.
The Gambler is for creative people, and the first mark of that is in its aesthetics and mechanics.
3. "Success"
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
The first thing I tried to talk about with The Gambler is that it's a movie made for creative people, something I elaborated on while focusing on the film's aesthetic qualities. I think an unfortunate truth about it, though, is that it's also a movie for successful people—the ideal audience being both successful and creative, which is a tragically small niche.
A fairy story about a fight with a fucking monster
I linked John Goodman's excellent last monologue in part 2 of this series, but it's a really important point of synthesis for the film so bear with me while I revisit it.
It starts out with Frank brushing on his perceptions of and experiences with alcoholism—doing so, naturally, with a brutal frankness (Frank-ness?) that will continue on for the rest of the scene:
Frank
You drink? I don't remember if you drink. Of course, there's drink, and drink. I drink, but I haven't been drunk since Raegan was president.
I got a DUI, and in jail, I actually fell down and pissed my pants. You don't need to do that twice. I tell you this so you'll know everybody's been there.
Big Ernie
Everybody's been there.
Frank
Once. If you're there twice—having been there once—I can't help you...
You know, I listen to the drunks, and it's like you're listening to a fight with a fucking monster, when the actual title of the story is "I Can't Handle My Liquor," by Mr. Crybaby.
Big Ernie
Amen.
Frank
I don't know, maybe they got a problem, but fuck 'em if they do, 'cause I don't.
I really like the way this bit of dialog captures the sense of ennui that successful people can develop when they truly outgrow their past. It reminds me of Jay Z's demolishing opening bars on "Success":
I used to give a fuck;
now I give a fuck less.
What do I think of suc-cess?
It sucks, too much stress
That ennui is (I think) a strange mix of empathy and contempt; it is the "confusion" that Jim's grandfather is referring to at the very start of the movie when he asks his grandson "who wants the world at their feet?"
We all value different things. That's a fact that's easy enough to acknowledge in the abstract or on some after-school special, but a lot harder to accept in reality, especially when our own values have changed over time and people we ostensibly identify with—who have values we used so subscribe to!—can ask us why we're not happy when we have a BMW M1.
Fuck you
The Gambler is filled with characters who define their personal success on their own terms, keep their own counsel, and don't (truly) try to push anyone else to make the same choices they did.
Ed (Jim's grandfather) spent a life accruing wealth only to eschew leaving it to his (apparently only) grandson, instead trying to pass on some lesson of character.
Amy Phillips pulls her professor "into an inappropriate relationship" after seeing him in an illegal casino (where, to be fair, she works as a waitress) and even accompanies him to go gamble away the last money his family will ever give him.
Neville Baraka tells Jim (and the audience) directly that he's "not a huge fan of low company"—he's
just doing what he has to do.
Roberta (Jim's mother) is well aware that "nothing's okay", but she wants to make her own goddamn decisions.
...And on and on and on. Literally every significant character in the movie is defined by a sense of true agency that's very rare—both in narrative and in life. They make their own unique decisions based on their life own unique life circumstances, and they accept the struggles and pain as well as the happiness and success.
In some sense one could see The Gambler as a philosophically
"conservative" movie, aligned with right-wing politics and... something something bootstraps, or whatever. I think the thinking behind The Gambler is much more personal than that, though; I see the film actually as a true manifestation of Stoic thought and an exploration of the ways in which we try to live our lives beyond the confines of the hedonic treadmill.
The real divergence away from conservatism and into Stoicism is the very end—the infamous two-and-a-half minute "running scene" where Jim Bennett is finally free of all monetary obligations and he just decides to... run, all the way (apparently across town) to the home of the lovely Amy Phillips.
From what I've seen, people don't like that scene because it doesn't actually feel very triumphant. It goes on a little too long and Wahlberg's character ostensibly hasn't even really achieved that much; he's just back to zero.
Jim Bennett's ultimate success—what is (in film) normally a moment of true Triumph-with-a-capital-T—ultimately just feels like an absence of the anxiety (and beatings) that had stalked Jim throughout the rest of the film.
Which is what success really feels like.
At the end, all reset to zero, Jim doesn't want the extra cash Frank offers him, or even a ride to where he's going, because Jim has finally reached a personal position of "fuck you". Money would've been great, but Jim (like others in the film) has already "done all that", not found it rewarding, and now he just wants to start over.
In the universe of The Gambler we see first-hand that success is something we define for ourselves and how it won't necessarily feel like anything we think we've been promised.
Personally, that's a message I wish I had truly absorbed many, many years ago.
...But, hey:
Everybody's been there.
4. Character
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
First, a quick recap of what I've covered so far:
The Gambler is a movie made for creative people, as seen in its aesthetic qualities---although it's also for successful people, which makes its ideal audience unfortunately small.
This link in the chain is about Jim Bennett's sense of ownership as a redeeming trait in his troubled character.
Everybody's (always) been there
So, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is just the idea that life is intrinsically very hard, and that we aren't braced enough for that as we're growing up.
To bitch about participation trophies here would be to miss the point as much as those old after-school specials do when they explore a perverse world where all differences between people are both completely superficial and fully resolvable within a comfortable 60 minute viewing window.
What I really mean to get at is that there's an inescapable struggle in life that cannot be softened. Part of accomplishment is loss; part of health is illness; part of life itself is death. We read Dr. Seuss and muse on the places our children will go but try our best not to think of all the hardships in those journeys and what will meet them. We cannot, in fact, let ourselves get overly preoccupied with those hardships, because otherwise we would never do anything to begin with, and neither would our progeny.
No human has ever had any choice but to take chances---some big, some small—and try to figure things out one step at time, each time the results come back to us. Life's a gamble.
But still, we have a strong tendency to commit this unkindness against ourselves that express through the concept of "regret". We'll do something, live through a bad outcome from it, learn from that experience, and wish that we could have known all along without the lesson. We say that we "regret" having done what we did that made up part of who we are today, as though our lived experiences are separable from who we are.
"Regret" sucks, but the worst part about it is that as unkind as we our to ourselves, we tend to me much more cruel to others. It can be hard to not feel frustrated when people do not already know without ever learning.
The character of Jim Bennett is like a lightning rod for this emotion, and I suspect it's because he can remind us of some of the worst parts of ourselves.
I suspect, though, that realizing the strengths that are present in Jim can similarly help us find some of the better parts of ourselves.
No, I needed it...
A turning point for Jim's character comes when he realizes Amy Phillips (his love interest, played by Brie Larson) is being endangered by her association with him.
He immediately moves to distance himself from her before fully (and finally)
launching into a plan to try to actually resolve his various mob-backed debts, something he was very notably unconcerned with before.
He is already on the hook for getting Lamar Allen to throw an upcoming game—that much was directly ordered by Neville Baraka—but Jim's approach shows immense consideration for Lamar as a person and deference to the basketball player's right to make his own decisions in life.
The discussion:
Lamar
What happened to your face, man?
Jim
A little while ago you came to me for advice about turning pro. I know it's about your knee, I know you have a feeling you have to put money in the bank, so...
I was wondering if you'd like to make a hundred fifty grand in two hours.
Lamar
Depends on what you have in mind.
Jim
Throwing a game. Can't win tomorrow by more than seven points.
Lamar
That's not throwing a game, that's winning by less than eight. Who wants me to do it?
Jim
Points at battered face
Lamar
What they got on you?
Jim
Doesn't matter.
Lamar
Man they fucked you up, and they ain't need to fuck you up.
Jim
No, I needed it. And they'll fuck you up if you need it too, you gotta deliver.
I'm asking 'cause I know you need it, it's up to you, it's your call.
Lamar
If I do this will I get you out of trouble?
Jim
No.
Key points that I think should be considered here:
First, Jim goes out on a limb to cut Lamar in on the money to be made. Note that Jim doesn't have Baraka's backing on this—he'll have to arrange his own bet on the game to fund it, all while hiding the entire exchange from Baraka—but he wants to do the right thing for the kid.
Second, while Jim does acknowledge to Lamar that Baraka's gang might try to come after him, he doesn't stress any personal risk to Lamar as a motivating factor. Realistically it seems unlikely that Lamar would be killed (or even seriously injured) without any direct interaction with Baraka or one of his people, but Jim is sure to be fully transparent about everything in play.
Third, Jim does everything he can to make himself a non-concern for Lamar. There is no attempt at emotional manipulation as Jim hides the risk to Amy, and he even tells Lamar that this definitively won't be enough to get him out of trouble.
Lamar is a key part in Jim's plan here, but Jim is taking immense ownership over the risks he's taking and refuses to put undue pressure on Lamar.
Paraphrasing a later scene, a man who takes ownership of his decisions and risks might even be more rare than a man who delivers.
Everything will start to be ok
I can understand why a lot of people would find Jim to be morally contemptible, but if you look back from the end of the movie I'm not sure that really holds up.
His absolution is to "get back to 0", having gotten out of debt and broken his ties to various organized crime syndicates, but not actually ending up with any money either. He declines Frank's invitation to take the "cream on top"—he won't even accept a ride home.
And he achieves this "feat" through immense personal risk and having spent the length of the film getting the absolute piss beaten out of him more and more. He even gives away his Omega watch because (apparently) fuck it—or so Frank would say.
So he's spent all this time torturing himself by proxy, suffering viscerally for his various mistakes, but gets back to 0 and is strong enough to walk away, having learned from his mistakes and having found something (and someone) he wants to protect.
Can you ask much more of someone than that? Should you?
Maybe more importantly:
Can you ask much more of yourself than that? Should you? | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 1 | https://halifaxbloggers.ca/flawintheiris/2015/01/the-gambler-1974-and-2014-review-the-rare-improved-reboot/ | en | The Gambler (1974 and 2014) reviews — The rare improved remake | [
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/logo_mobile_off.png",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_menu.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_search.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_history.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/social_facebook.png",
"https:/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"flawintheiris"
] | 2015-01-04T06:27:29+00:00 | Two movies 40 years apart, with the new deal seeing the winning card on the river | en | /favicon.ico | Flaw in the Iris | https://halifaxbloggers.ca/flawintheiris/2015/01/the-gambler-1974-and-2014-review-the-rare-improved-reboot/ | The Gambler (1974)
Directed by Karel Reisz, written by James Toback
The Gambler (2014)
Directed by Rupert Wyatt, written by William Monahan from the screenplay by James Toback
Having seen the new version starring Mark Wahlberg, I went back to screen the original film for comparison. I’m a fan of 1970s American thrillers in general, but was surprised to find the newer movie shinier and more complex than the original, the rare case where the remake, 40 years later, is better.
Not that The Gambler of 1974 isn’t worth seeing, but as a feature drama, this is standard, five-card no-draw material.
The immortal James Caan is Axel Freed, a New York professor from a Jewish family where grandad came from the old country to become a self-made millionaire and mom is a doctor. Axel has a few problems with finances: He can’t seem to afford buttons on his shirts above the xiphoid process and owes $44,000 to a number of bad men, including 1970s heavies Paul Sorvino, Burt Young, and Vic Tayback. These aren’t unreasonable dudes, but they want their money.
Axel’s days are spent trying to explain the vagaries of desire to unengaged students in his college English class, including a young basketball talent. Otherwise he’s out driving around town in a convertible Mustang or hanging with Lauren Hutton, who doesn’t do much here but play observer to his compulsions. Also look for M. Emmett Walsh and James Woods in small roles.
A portrait of a confident man, but one hobbled by his disease, the film is a rote cautionary tale and a fairly predictable family drama, which totally goes off the rails late in the running when Axel runs afoul of Antonio Fargas’ pimp.
In the newer film, Mark Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett is a far more interesting central presence. He’s also a college prof and author, but very much a Los Angeles creature in his M3 Beemer. This isn’t a man with a gambling problem, he’s nurturing a beef with life itself. He actively loathes his job and his class of students studying the modern novel—including the perpetually distracted basketball star (Anthony Kelley)—railing against their mediocrity in lecture halls while celebrating a single student for her writing talent—Amy, played by a luminous Brie Larson. Amy also happens to also work at the casino Jim frequents.
Like Axel, Jim owes a lot of money. With inflation it’s up over 200 grand. His bad men are Alvin Ing, Michael Kenneth Williams, and especially John Goodman, whose half-naked bath house appearance, head-shaving, and monologue about how America was built on “fuck you” will be haunting my nightmares. If there’s a single reason to see the movie, it’s Goodman at his powers’ peak.
There’s also a vaguely oedipal relationship between Jim and his mother, Roberta (Jessica Lange). In this version Jim’s grandfather dies early on, and the gambling debt serves as a catalyst for a final schism between Jim and his family. These people are nouveau-riche California WASPs, and that might be partly why Jim hates himself so much.
That’s maybe The Gambler‘s biggest problem—we never really get to the source of Jim’s existential angst, though we hear it aired repeatedly in long-winded speeches. And Wahlberg isn’t entirely convincing as an academic—any more than Caan was—but he does manage a wiry, nihilistic charisma.
Fortunately, the film gathers all kinds of momentum as the deadline to pay back the debt approaches—the plot expires over a week following Jim’s efforts to secure the cash he owes. Director Wyatt delivers enough stylistic flourishes leading into a final act of sweat-staining suspense, tightening up the narrative excesses.
In conclusion, The Gambler may not amount to more than a break even, but it’s a hand worth playing. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 22 | https://closingcreditsuk.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/film-review-the-gambler-2014/ | en | Film Review: The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://closingcreditsuk.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/the-gambler-review.jpg?w=676",
"https://closingcreditsuk.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/the_gambler_2014_pic03.jpg?w=676&h=459",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"htt... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/A8rCHUjjqnU?version=3&rel=0&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-22T00:00:00 | Director: Rupert Wyatt Writer: William Monahan Stars: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange Don't take the gamble on this woefully inept remake. Spoilers for both the 1974 and 2014 versions of The Gambler below... At the end of Karel Reisz’s 1974 film The Gambler James Caan’s character is debt-free after dragging a young student… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Closing Credits | https://closingcreditsuk.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/film-review-the-gambler-2014/ | Director: Rupert Wyatt
Writer: William Monahan
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jessica Lange
Don’t take the gamble on this woefully inept remake.
Spoilers for both the 1974 and 2014 versions of The Gambler below…
At the end of Karel Reisz’s 1974 film The Gambler James Caan’s character is debt-free after dragging a young student with a promising basketball career into the world of sports fixing. The student, Caan sees, is just as susceptible to making a quick thousand dollars as Caan is to losing it. Caan never smiles or shows signs of having broken free of his addiction; rather he goes into a nearby rundown brothel, picks a fight with a pimp, and has his face slashed in the process. He stares at his bleeding face in the mirror, both a reminder forever of his self-inflicted destruction yet a warning to the audience that he is far from saved. It’s one of the darkest and depressing endings in 70s cinema and yet, it is the prefect end.
Fast forward 40 years and we have Rupert Wyatt’s remake. This one ends with Mark Wahlberg’s character Jim Bennett running through the streets through a series of jump cuts whilst a popular song plays out loud, hoping to raise the audience’s spirits as he races towards the home of a girl we have barely gotten to know. Wyatt’s film wants to be about redemption and new starts, but it earns nothing.
I wouldn’t typically describe the ending of a film in a review but it perfectly encapsulates everything which is wrong with Wyatt’s film on its own, and how utterly vacant it is as a remake. In 1974 The Gambler was a quiet study in addiction within a man who was fully aware of his problems but to him the rush comes from the thought of losing it all; Reisz never asks the audience to feel sorry for Caan nor does he try to heighten emotions by bombarding his audience with familiar source music or by manufacturing tension. This, it seems, is all Rupert Wyatt has left in his director’s toolkit because I saw little evidence to suggest anything approaching the talent which was behind The Escapist and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.
It’s safe to say I actively disliked nearly every film making decision in this new version of The Gambler but by the same token I can understand why some viewers might accept or even like it; wall-to-wall source music, ‘creative’ onscreen text/angles/overcranking/jumpcuts, an uplifting ending, ‘cool’ dialogue and scenery chewing from several well known actors is to be found in nearly every scene. The issue I found from the very start is that Wyatt’s direction paired with William Monahan’s faux-Tarantino screenplay is forever in service of nothing; is it a comedy? Is it a relationship drama? Is it a (very weak) character study? Is it a thriller? It dips its toe into all genres but never once commits to getting out of the shallow end.
Why do we care if Wahlberg pays off his debt if we don’t like the character, and why do we care if he ends up with the girl if we don’t like him and know very little about her? Certainly protagonists can be unlikable and we might dislike their morals and ethics, but in the case of Jim Bennett he’s just a cocky, arrogant asshole which, I assume, Monahan thought would be someone we can get behind once they decide to go straight, but I was unable to find one redeeming feature about this character. The problem is that nothing in Monahan’s script feels real, his dialogue comes across as forced, trying to be hip and memorable, but the characters never once ring true saying these words even if the likes of (the usually dependable) John Goodman are delivering the lines. The same was true of his truly awful 2010 film London Boulevard, which makes this script look good.
For a film about stakes and gambling, nothing ever feels at stake nor does Wyatt convince any sense of foreboding and it all feels far too light and breezy for us to get engaged with. This brings us back to the question ‘why do I care?’ or more predominantly ‘why did this film get made?’ because nothing clicks, nothing works, and we’ve seen this all before. Perhaps The Gambler just came at the wrong time for me, a juncture where I have to say this simply isn’t good enough and one film takes the brunt of my frustration; with all the talent involved and a fantastic original film to draw inspiration from, The Gambler is a loser any way you look at it.
In gambling terminology; No dice. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 75 | https://everythingnoir.com/2015/05/03/review-the-gambler/ | en | Review: The Gambler | http://cinemanerdz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gambler-poster.jpg | http://cinemanerdz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gambler-poster.jpg | [
"https://i0.wp.com/cinemanerdz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gambler-poster.jpg",
"https://i0.wp.com/imgick.nj.com/home/njo-media/width620/img/entertainment_impact/photo/16567376-mmmain.jpg",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://pixel.wp... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y5gPQXbFs9Y?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-05-03T00:00:00 | The Gambler is a neo noir film from last year and I was finally able to see it on Blu-Ray. The reviews are a mixed bag for this film. I got to say I really enjoyed it. I loved the noirish cinematography, the story and the performances. Reading some of the headlines for the negative… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | everythingnoir | https://everythingnoir.com/2015/05/03/review-the-gambler/ | The Gambler is a neo noir film from last year and I was finally able to see it on Blu-Ray. The reviews are a mixed bag for this film. I got to say I really enjoyed it. I loved the noirish cinematography, the story and the performances. Reading some of the headlines for the negative reviews for this film, mention how it don’t stand up to the original. I’m the first to jump on the” re-make is unnecessary” camp and understand where these people are coming from. I, unfortunately have never seen the original(though I hope to someday) so I went into this film with no preconceived idea of what to expect. Maybe this is why I enjoyed it so much.
This film is based on the original screenplay by James Toback and tweaked for a new generation by William Monahan who has done some great neo-noir and crime films. The film is directed by Rupert Wyatt.
This film stars Mark Wahlberg as our anti-hero main character. He is a writer and a professor, but that is second to being a gambler. We also have Jessica Lange as his mother. Brie Larson as his brilliant student and his romantic interest as well as perhaps his saver. We have Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman as opposing gangsters. We also have Williams’ co-star from The Wire,Domenick Lombardozzi, showing up as Goodman’s top henchman.
Our story starts with Wahlberg gambling in a Korean gambling den. He is playing blackjack and doing very well at first, he then loses. The Korean’s want their money, Williams offers Wahlberg $50,000 to try to get even, he doesn’t. He then goes to Goodman for a loan. Goodman reminds him that Williams will kill him if he doesn’t pay back his debt. We then find Wahlberg at his day job as a professor. We take off from there as he juggles his debt, his family, and his class of students.
I really liked the neo noir filming style in this film. One of the things you will notice while watching this is each person our protagonist owes money has their own color,the Korean’s color is green, Michael Kenneth Williams’ gang has the color black and John Goodman’s color is red. I first picked upon this in the scene where Wahlberg is waiting to be picked up by Lombardozzi. I noticed all the cars are white, grey and black in a wash of Land Rovers and BMW’s we see Lombardozzi pull up in a bright red Porsche Cayenne. There are a lot of beautiful noir like scenes in this from the smokey gambling halls, to a grayed out class room, to the neon lights of a casino. I also loved the soundtrack for this film and how it was used. Also pay attention to Wahlberg’s suit throughout the film and how it changes.
Like I said, I really liked this film, but I have not seen the original. I think if you go into this with fresh eyes and do not compare it to the original you may enjoy it too. I would love to hear from those lucky enough to see both of these films and what your thought on both are.
Favorite tidbit: Mark Wahlberg dropped 61lbs for his role going from 198lbs to 137lbs, to show the characters lack of caring about his health and well-being. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 34 | https://realmoviecritic.com/2014/12/29/the-gambler/ | en | Real Movie Critic | [
"https://realmoviecritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-real-movie-critic1.jpg",
"https://realmoviecritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/image5.jpg?w=192&h=300",
"https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/3ae78a80f449ee2ade5264bd3d3e1395be1af6fa3f73ef741050742ec0465fe4?s=48&d=identicon&r=G",
"https://0.gravatar.c... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2014-12-29T00:00:00 | (SPOILER WARNING!!! This article does contain spoilers, if you haven’t seen the movie, just see the first paragraph to be informed without spoilers!!!) The Gambler brings some solid acting by Mark Wahlberg with an interesting story of the evil side of gambling and debt desperation, but the character in this movie really wasn't likable to… | en | Real Movie Critic | https://realmoviecritic.com/2014/12/29/the-gambler/ | (SPOILER WARNING!!! This article does contain spoilers, if you haven’t seen the movie, just see the first paragraph to be informed without spoilers!!!)
The Gambler brings some solid acting by Mark Wahlberg with an interesting story of the evil side of gambling and debt desperation, but the character in this movie really wasn’t likable to me, and begs the question, do you really care for what will happen to him or not. Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars.
Ahh, the great Mark Wahlberg aka Marky Mark. Of course I say this sarcastically calling him great, but I really do enjoy him as a person on and off the camera. Out of all the actors coming from my hometown city of Boston, Mark Wahlberg really captures the Boston spirit when it comes to the people here. That tough Boston guy personality where you can tell he is from the regular slums of Boston, and the way he interacts with his other brothers and friends who are entertainers as well. He used to be a one hit wonder rapper with the hit Good Vibrations, and his modeling for Calvin Klien underwear (Which I’m sure he still gets ridiculed till this day). As an entertainer he definitely has what it takes and has really come along as an actor year after year, and hasn’t lost his Boston touch. Some movies he made that I loved were The Fighter, Ted, Four Brothers, and The Departed (which he got an Oscar nod for), however, he made some bad ones as well like Max Payne and The Happening. Love him or hate him, he will always be strongly supported by his Boston fans, and it is a very strong fan base. So I enjoy calling him great, it is sarcastic, but fun at the same time. For the movie The Gambler, I will start with what I like, the so so, to what I didn’t like.
What I like, let me start by saying I’m not familiar with the original The Gambler movie starring James Caan, and I didn’t know this was a remake when I saw this movie. I thought the story was very intriguing and deals with the dark and evil story of a person dealing with the addiction of gambling. The character, Jim Bennett, played by the great Mark Wahlberg, definitely had a big gambling problem which leads to him to a big debt with an underground Korean gambling kingpin named Lee, played by Alvin Ing. He makes an ultimatum with Jim where he needs $260,000 in seven days, or he risks getting killed. It seems cliched but this what really creates the character of Jim Bennett. I have to say is this is some strong acting for Mark Wahlberg since his role as Staff Sergent Sean Dignam in The Departed. He was a person who pretty much had it all, a rich family, a English college professor job, wrote a top best selling book which pretty much made him famous, yet he still didn’t think it was enough and goes and gambles all his earnings away. At the beginning of the movie when he goes to the underground Korean casino, he plays like he knows what he is doing. In blackjack, he kept winning by playing smart, but his problem is that he doesn’t know when to stop. He always double what he won, and when he loses, he ends up with nothing. With his trip to the underground Korean casino he meets up with a guy named Neville Baraka, played by Michael K. Williams. He likes the way Jim plays so he decided to loan him $10,000to play which got Jim up to $80,000 which Neville tells him to stop and pay his cut that he owes, but Jim refuses and decides to go all in on a game of roulette betting on black which he loses. Needless to say, this angers Neville and asks to pay for his $60,000 soon. Which now leads Jim with a debt of over $300,000 which he does not have. However, he believes that Neville is a nobody and could be avoided, but that turns out that he was wrong. He decides to try and get a loan from another gambling kingpin named Frank, played by John Goodman. He was willing to give him the $250,000 only if he admits that he is a worthless man with no dignity, but Jim did have some pride and refuses. So now he had to come up with the money before getting killed. During the movie it shows how he is, it’s like he doesn’t care about himself and even with him selling a top selling book, he still believes he is a nobody. It shows during his class to college students how crazy he is. He goes on telling students if they are in it to become famous but don’t have true talent, that they should stop now and go to a regular profession. He even goes on telling the class that only three people have true talent which angers most the class leading them to drop the class. Those three people he mentioned were Dexter, played by Emory Cohen, a slacker who realized he is a great tennis player and will become professional. There is also, Lamar Allen, played by Anyhony Kelley, who is a great basketball player for his school and will be in the NBA, but has no interest in studying and just wants to make the big NBA money to help his family with medical bills. Lastly, there is Amy Phillips, played by Brie Larson, who has the potential to be a great writer. They each have a good relationship with Jim and knows about his gambling problem, and Jim always encourages them to be the best and don’t waste their true talent. What most I like about Jim is that when he wants something, he will try to get it with no BS whatsoever.
The so so, Jim has some interesting relationships. Most notably with his mother, Roberta played by Jessica Lange. Jim comes from a rich family, but really wanted to make a name for himself and not because of his family. His mother knows that, but she really wants to know what is going on in Jim’s life, and why he acts this way. When Jim finally opens up to her and mentions his gambling debt, she immediately wants to give Jim the money. Jim didn’t want her to do that, but she insisted. This lead to the scene at the bank where she requests that large sum of money, and you can see that Jim gets his personality by his mother. When he receives the money, his mother gave him an ultimatum that if he gets into gambling trouble again she will disown him. The reason I find this relationship so so is because what he uses the money for which I will explain in what I didn’t like, which really puts this relationship to shame, and almost not worth it. He also develops a romantic relationship with Amy. Amy knows first hand about his gambling addiction, because she works as a waitress in the underground Korean casino. Yet she still has a relationship with him. Maybe she finds more to him than what his external personality shows, but it is a double whammy that he is her college professor. I don’t know, but if I was her I wouldn’t do it. However, she kind of brings a sense of another purpose for Jim in his life, and I guess that’s a good thing.
What I didn’t like, the character Jim had to be the stupidest guy I’ve seen. He gets the money from his mom and should pay off his debt with Lee, but instead, he gambled all the $260,000 away. I mean how stupid can you be in doing that. Also when Neville comes and threatens him for his money which he obviously didn’t have, he made him go to Lamar Allen to point shave his next game and not win by more than seven. At first, Jim didn’t want to do it, but Neville threaten to kill Amy if he doesn’t. So he goes to Lamar, and tells him if he does he will earn $150,000 cash. Lamar without skipping a beat agrees risking his future NBA career in doing so. It brings up to this so called game, where all you see is Lamar dominating, then all of a sudden not doing well to get him benched, then coming back when the team is down and coming back to dominate again to actually win by seven points. My biggest gripe in that game is that if he has the ball in the final seconds leading by seven, why are they setting him up for a game winning shot. It’s just a shot and he could hold the ball till time runs out, and why didn’t the other team foul to try and get the ball back. That other team coach must be stupid or something. This solved one of Jim’s problems with Neville. So he finally decides to get the loan from Frank. Frank gives him the loan, but threatens him that if he plans to not pay back or commit suicide he will go after his whole family. So with that money he recieves he calls both kingpins to meet at a casino and only has enough money to pay only one person back. So he decides to gamble it on roulette on black. At this point should I really care for this character after all the stupid things he did and risking other people’s lives with his stupidness. I didn’t really care what the outcome for him was, cuz he did deserve to be killed. In the end, it did land on black and he managed to pay off his debt. Then that while whatever scene of him running to Amy’s place. When you don’t care for the main character, the movie really is worthless, and that’s how I felt.
Overall, I heard that the original The Gambler movie was really good which lead to some Oscar nods. I guess I have to go out and watch it someday. As for this movie, though a good performance by the great Mark Wahlberg, I didn’t care for his character. I like how the movie explores the reality of how evil gambling can be, but if you can’t root for the main character, then why even bother!!! Final Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 6 | https://rpc3.co/the-gambler-2014/ | en | RPC absolutely loves The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Larson_casino_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Wahlberg_tennis_chair.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Ing_nail_salon_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/content/The-Gambler/Part-2/Goodman_bar_1.png",
"https://cdn.rpc3.co/co... | [
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2t1dG_Tfg9s?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Q7WmQSjFfls?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jClWqDFaKus?rel=0",
"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xg7oHCdJrkE?rel=0"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"R Phillip Castagna"
] | 2020-04-19T10:42:03+00:00 | I had another blog-type of thing before, and, oddly, the writing I had up there that got the most traffic over time was a series of posts I wrote about the 2014 remake of The Gambler... | en | RPC3 | https://rpc3.co/the-gambler-2014/ | Preamble
I had another blog-type of thing before, and, oddly, the writing I had up there that got the most traffic over time was a series of posts I wrote about the 2014 remake of The Gambler, directed by Rupert Wyatt and starring Mark Wahlberg. Each post began exactly the same way, and in the series I tried to lay out the different things I loved about the movie, which got (and still suffers from) absolutely terrible reviews.
Since the content had seemingly found some unknown audience, I decided to go ahead and port it over to this new site. I suspect there's a surprising amount of value in really nailing any given niche, even when it's as tiny as this one.
What was previously a post is now separated within this text with a numbered heading. Little to no edits have been made beyond this reflow-ed structure, however, aside from some essential technical changes that hopefully won't impact anything too much.
Enjoy, and you should definitely watch the film if you haven't yet!
1. Film introduction
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn't the greatest movie ever made.
Don't think there aren't many people who would like to try. At the time of writing the movie stands with a 6/10 rating on IMDB and a truly brutal 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. It seems to have fared about as well as you'd expect it to if it was a film about a well-educated wealthy white male who gambles away both his own fortune and a sizable chunk of his family's—with no apparent remorse whatsoever—only to learn nothing and instead initiate an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student and escape his predicaments through a combination of rigging a sports bet by corrupting a promising athlete into throwing a game and making up the balance with blind luck in an outrageous bet... which is exactly what it is.
Jim Bennett isn't an incredibly sympathetic protagonist. As Frank puts it in the actual movie itself:
Birth, education, intelligence, talent, looks, family, money... has all this been some real comprehensive fucking burden for you?
...And to top it off, the movie is basically entirely talking! When it was (by all appearances) marketed as an action movie!
It's worth plenty.
The fact that the remake of The Gambler was received so poorly might actually make me love it more in some ways.
The thing is, movies are expensive to make.[citation needed] Movies are expensive to make, and the major studios that make them are all divisions of publicly traded corporations that are legally obligated to try to squeeze out whatever money can be found by making them. That means limiting risk, that means making films that internationalize well, that means 3 super hero pseudo-sequels inside a shared cinematic universe every single year. Even all the way from New York, NY, we can see how Hollywood, CA changes when a Fast and the Furious sequel can make $400,000,000 in China alone and suddenly Dwayne Johnson has Jack Nicholson's floor seats for the Lakers.
The Gambler was a risk though. A genuine, honest-to-God risk that didn't even totally pay off. It's unapologetically wordy, entirely based in reality, deals with existential issues, relies on strong but often subtle acting, and has an overall sense of craftsmanship that's hard to find in major studio films. It's niche. To me, the fact that it ended up being unpopular is just a testament to it actually having a vision and not being some focused-grouped-to-hell bullshit. The Gambler takes a stand and was punished for it, but no one can ever pull a Brie Larson and ask its creators "did you make this because you believed in it or because you thought this was what people wanted?"
Wikipedia says The Gambler's director Rupert Wyatt "made his directorial début with the 2008 film The Escapist" before proceeding to actually make money by directing 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes---a classic Sundance-to-riches success story. I think you see a lot of Wyatt's indie sensibilities on display in The Gambler, (a friend of mine once said it's like someone made a Sundance film with a major Hollywood budget,) something which actually ties in well with its thematic content and ethos. After all, "who wants the world at their feet? It's confusing isn't it?"
A classroom full of students who don't give a fuck
The most niche thing about The Gambler (and what I love about it the most) is that it's a movie for creative people. It's for people who feel like they could yell as loud as they want and nobody cares. It culminates in Wahlberg's climactic monologue to Larson, which (personally) didn't just strike close to home for me, it cut straight to my heart:
You know there was a student—just the other day—who said that my problem (if one's nature is a problem, rather than just fucking problematic) is that I see things in terms of victory or death, and not just victory but total victory. It's true. I always have.
I mean it's either victory or don't bother. I mean, the only thing worth doing is the impossible, right? Everything else is fucking grey.
I mean you're born as a man with the nerves of a soldier, the apprehension of an angel, so lift a phrase, but there's no fucking use for it. Here? Where's the use for it? What, you're set to be a philosopher or a king or fucking Shakespeare, and this is all they give you? This? What, twenty-odd years of schooling—which is all instruction in how to be ordinary, or they'll fucking kill you—and they fucking will! ...Y'know, and then it's a career, which is just not the same thing as existence, so...
I want unlimited things. I want everything. I want a real fucking love, a real fucking house, a real fucking thing to do, everyday, and I just... I'd rather die if I don't get it.
In my experience, people tend to diverge sharply on their reaction to that speech. Some people (like me) feel like they can really relate to it... And then there's a large group of other people who are more inclined to say it's one of the craziest things they've ever heard.
There's a quote from an Eddie Huang story that I think speaks to the same kind of perception:
No matter what a stripper tells you, there are two types of people in this world. There are those who take the world at face value, keep the computers putin’, and don’t know to feel otherwise. The other type of person in this world has seen something wicked and the rest of their life is spent reconciling that vision against their existence.
I think that creative mindset (or instinct, or whatever) is both a real thing and only present in a minority of the world's population. A strong majority of people really are fine just "keeping the computers putin'", and it's always tough to genuinely feel different from everyone else around you. To that end, I would say the thing I appreciate most about The Gambler (and the thing I'd always want to bring up first) is that it feels like a genuinely very helpful movie.
It was for me, at least.
2. Aesthetics
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
The first thing I always try to explain about The Gambler is that it's really a movie made for creative people. That's easy to say, but maybe not easy to convince someone of, so let's dig into it a bit more.
Maybe I enjoy the show
I remember the first time I saw the film was at an Alamo Drafthouse in Ashburn, VA—a sleepy neighborhood I didn't know at all, about a 45 minute drive from where I was living at the time. My girlfriend and I would make the trek out for occasional date nights, and I really appreciated how out-of-the-way it felt. The drive back, in particular, would usually be after 1am (late for the DMV, outside of Friday/Saturday night bars and clubs) along a nearly-empty beltway with enough time to let any given movie really sink in.
I remember making this journey back from the theater after the movie, and before I ever thought too much about why the film's themes resonated with me, I just kept thinking about how incredibly striking it was.
In a post-Loving Vincent world the "every frame a painting" adage might feel a little overwrought, but it's hard to find a single camera shot in The Gambler that isn't gorgeous. The cinematography relishes in interesting compositions that the main characters have a small presence in, along with varied, contrasting colors, and a strong sense of the environment for any given scene.
Even within the repeated setting of Jim Bennet's lecture hall, framing and lighting are manipulated to emphasize the warmth between Wahlberg's character and Larson's as well as the shared frustration with the world that connects Jim Bennet and Lamar Allan.
The creative shot composition doesn't just help the movie stand out aesthetically, either. This idea is something I want to revisit later, but all the main characters in the film are singular within their worlds, and the tendency of the movie to minimize their actual form on-screen emphasizes that.
Even in crowded scenes like the casinos, The Gambler prefers to let its main characters fall into the background of obscured shots rather than force a framing where they pop out to the camera more. The creative discipline to it is both unusual and terribly effective.
Seven days
The writing in The Gambler was just as striking to me as its visual aesthetic, and while the monologues are an obvious discussion point here, the creative discipline to some of the dialog is worth mentioning as well. Alvin Ing absolutely crushes his role, for instance, but part of that is capturing a very restrained sense of menace to the elder mobster that is Mr. Lee. His ultimatum to Bennet isn't gratuitous, he just wants his money in seven days... period.
In The Gambler the writing isn't just good in an abstract sense, it's actually good screenplay writing that gives the actors room to bring in their own energy. It might not be obvious why "I don't fucking want to do that shit" is a great line, but that's only when you haven't seen Michael Williams destroy the screen with it:
Of course, the other part of what makes the movie's writing so great are the times when it does simply go in, no holds barred. Goodman's last monologue is a great example of that—it's funny and clever while also being incredibly brazen and insensitive in a way that an actual mobster would be.
Got by talent, imagine that
I think some of what I appreciate as craftsmanship is exactly what kept The Gambler niche. What's "striking" to me feels overblown or even melodramatic to other people. Which is fine. I aim to be a man for all seasons, not all things to all people, and I appreciate others—and especially works of art—that do the same.
The sense of of a determined aesthetic present in the movie, though, is something that I think is indisputable. People might wish it pursued something different with the same enthusiasm, but the creative drive can't be waved away.
I think for creative people, though, the drive to bring a creative vision to life without compromise—regardless of what that vision actually is—is more respectable than anything else. In every field, professionals recognize other professionals before any other judgements, and The Gambler is unabashedly artsy in a way that people of the same make can empathize with.
The Gambler is for creative people, and the first mark of that is in its aesthetics and mechanics.
3. "Success"
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
The first thing I tried to talk about with The Gambler is that it's a movie made for creative people, something I elaborated on while focusing on the film's aesthetic qualities. I think an unfortunate truth about it, though, is that it's also a movie for successful people—the ideal audience being both successful and creative, which is a tragically small niche.
A fairy story about a fight with a fucking monster
I linked John Goodman's excellent last monologue in part 2 of this series, but it's a really important point of synthesis for the film so bear with me while I revisit it.
It starts out with Frank brushing on his perceptions of and experiences with alcoholism—doing so, naturally, with a brutal frankness (Frank-ness?) that will continue on for the rest of the scene:
Frank
You drink? I don't remember if you drink. Of course, there's drink, and drink. I drink, but I haven't been drunk since Raegan was president.
I got a DUI, and in jail, I actually fell down and pissed my pants. You don't need to do that twice. I tell you this so you'll know everybody's been there.
Big Ernie
Everybody's been there.
Frank
Once. If you're there twice—having been there once—I can't help you...
You know, I listen to the drunks, and it's like you're listening to a fight with a fucking monster, when the actual title of the story is "I Can't Handle My Liquor," by Mr. Crybaby.
Big Ernie
Amen.
Frank
I don't know, maybe they got a problem, but fuck 'em if they do, 'cause I don't.
I really like the way this bit of dialog captures the sense of ennui that successful people can develop when they truly outgrow their past. It reminds me of Jay Z's demolishing opening bars on "Success":
I used to give a fuck;
now I give a fuck less.
What do I think of suc-cess?
It sucks, too much stress
That ennui is (I think) a strange mix of empathy and contempt; it is the "confusion" that Jim's grandfather is referring to at the very start of the movie when he asks his grandson "who wants the world at their feet?"
We all value different things. That's a fact that's easy enough to acknowledge in the abstract or on some after-school special, but a lot harder to accept in reality, especially when our own values have changed over time and people we ostensibly identify with—who have values we used so subscribe to!—can ask us why we're not happy when we have a BMW M1.
Fuck you
The Gambler is filled with characters who define their personal success on their own terms, keep their own counsel, and don't (truly) try to push anyone else to make the same choices they did.
Ed (Jim's grandfather) spent a life accruing wealth only to eschew leaving it to his (apparently only) grandson, instead trying to pass on some lesson of character.
Amy Phillips pulls her professor "into an inappropriate relationship" after seeing him in an illegal casino (where, to be fair, she works as a waitress) and even accompanies him to go gamble away the last money his family will ever give him.
Neville Baraka tells Jim (and the audience) directly that he's "not a huge fan of low company"—he's
just doing what he has to do.
Roberta (Jim's mother) is well aware that "nothing's okay", but she wants to make her own goddamn decisions.
...And on and on and on. Literally every significant character in the movie is defined by a sense of true agency that's very rare—both in narrative and in life. They make their own unique decisions based on their life own unique life circumstances, and they accept the struggles and pain as well as the happiness and success.
In some sense one could see The Gambler as a philosophically
"conservative" movie, aligned with right-wing politics and... something something bootstraps, or whatever. I think the thinking behind The Gambler is much more personal than that, though; I see the film actually as a true manifestation of Stoic thought and an exploration of the ways in which we try to live our lives beyond the confines of the hedonic treadmill.
The real divergence away from conservatism and into Stoicism is the very end—the infamous two-and-a-half minute "running scene" where Jim Bennett is finally free of all monetary obligations and he just decides to... run, all the way (apparently across town) to the home of the lovely Amy Phillips.
From what I've seen, people don't like that scene because it doesn't actually feel very triumphant. It goes on a little too long and Wahlberg's character ostensibly hasn't even really achieved that much; he's just back to zero.
Jim Bennett's ultimate success—what is (in film) normally a moment of true Triumph-with-a-capital-T—ultimately just feels like an absence of the anxiety (and beatings) that had stalked Jim throughout the rest of the film.
Which is what success really feels like.
At the end, all reset to zero, Jim doesn't want the extra cash Frank offers him, or even a ride to where he's going, because Jim has finally reached a personal position of "fuck you". Money would've been great, but Jim (like others in the film) has already "done all that", not found it rewarding, and now he just wants to start over.
In the universe of The Gambler we see first-hand that success is something we define for ourselves and how it won't necessarily feel like anything we think we've been promised.
Personally, that's a message I wish I had truly absorbed many, many years ago.
...But, hey:
Everybody's been there.
4. Character
No one will ever convince me that the 2014 remake of The Gambler isn’t the greatest movie ever made.
First, a quick recap of what I've covered so far:
The Gambler is a movie made for creative people, as seen in its aesthetic qualities---although it's also for successful people, which makes its ideal audience unfortunately small.
This link in the chain is about Jim Bennett's sense of ownership as a redeeming trait in his troubled character.
Everybody's (always) been there
So, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is just the idea that life is intrinsically very hard, and that we aren't braced enough for that as we're growing up.
To bitch about participation trophies here would be to miss the point as much as those old after-school specials do when they explore a perverse world where all differences between people are both completely superficial and fully resolvable within a comfortable 60 minute viewing window.
What I really mean to get at is that there's an inescapable struggle in life that cannot be softened. Part of accomplishment is loss; part of health is illness; part of life itself is death. We read Dr. Seuss and muse on the places our children will go but try our best not to think of all the hardships in those journeys and what will meet them. We cannot, in fact, let ourselves get overly preoccupied with those hardships, because otherwise we would never do anything to begin with, and neither would our progeny.
No human has ever had any choice but to take chances---some big, some small—and try to figure things out one step at time, each time the results come back to us. Life's a gamble.
But still, we have a strong tendency to commit this unkindness against ourselves that express through the concept of "regret". We'll do something, live through a bad outcome from it, learn from that experience, and wish that we could have known all along without the lesson. We say that we "regret" having done what we did that made up part of who we are today, as though our lived experiences are separable from who we are.
"Regret" sucks, but the worst part about it is that as unkind as we our to ourselves, we tend to me much more cruel to others. It can be hard to not feel frustrated when people do not already know without ever learning.
The character of Jim Bennett is like a lightning rod for this emotion, and I suspect it's because he can remind us of some of the worst parts of ourselves.
I suspect, though, that realizing the strengths that are present in Jim can similarly help us find some of the better parts of ourselves.
No, I needed it...
A turning point for Jim's character comes when he realizes Amy Phillips (his love interest, played by Brie Larson) is being endangered by her association with him.
He immediately moves to distance himself from her before fully (and finally)
launching into a plan to try to actually resolve his various mob-backed debts, something he was very notably unconcerned with before.
He is already on the hook for getting Lamar Allen to throw an upcoming game—that much was directly ordered by Neville Baraka—but Jim's approach shows immense consideration for Lamar as a person and deference to the basketball player's right to make his own decisions in life.
The discussion:
Lamar
What happened to your face, man?
Jim
A little while ago you came to me for advice about turning pro. I know it's about your knee, I know you have a feeling you have to put money in the bank, so...
I was wondering if you'd like to make a hundred fifty grand in two hours.
Lamar
Depends on what you have in mind.
Jim
Throwing a game. Can't win tomorrow by more than seven points.
Lamar
That's not throwing a game, that's winning by less than eight. Who wants me to do it?
Jim
Points at battered face
Lamar
What they got on you?
Jim
Doesn't matter.
Lamar
Man they fucked you up, and they ain't need to fuck you up.
Jim
No, I needed it. And they'll fuck you up if you need it too, you gotta deliver.
I'm asking 'cause I know you need it, it's up to you, it's your call.
Lamar
If I do this will I get you out of trouble?
Jim
No.
Key points that I think should be considered here:
First, Jim goes out on a limb to cut Lamar in on the money to be made. Note that Jim doesn't have Baraka's backing on this—he'll have to arrange his own bet on the game to fund it, all while hiding the entire exchange from Baraka—but he wants to do the right thing for the kid.
Second, while Jim does acknowledge to Lamar that Baraka's gang might try to come after him, he doesn't stress any personal risk to Lamar as a motivating factor. Realistically it seems unlikely that Lamar would be killed (or even seriously injured) without any direct interaction with Baraka or one of his people, but Jim is sure to be fully transparent about everything in play.
Third, Jim does everything he can to make himself a non-concern for Lamar. There is no attempt at emotional manipulation as Jim hides the risk to Amy, and he even tells Lamar that this definitively won't be enough to get him out of trouble.
Lamar is a key part in Jim's plan here, but Jim is taking immense ownership over the risks he's taking and refuses to put undue pressure on Lamar.
Paraphrasing a later scene, a man who takes ownership of his decisions and risks might even be more rare than a man who delivers.
Everything will start to be ok
I can understand why a lot of people would find Jim to be morally contemptible, but if you look back from the end of the movie I'm not sure that really holds up.
His absolution is to "get back to 0", having gotten out of debt and broken his ties to various organized crime syndicates, but not actually ending up with any money either. He declines Frank's invitation to take the "cream on top"—he won't even accept a ride home.
And he achieves this "feat" through immense personal risk and having spent the length of the film getting the absolute piss beaten out of him more and more. He even gives away his Omega watch because (apparently) fuck it—or so Frank would say.
So he's spent all this time torturing himself by proxy, suffering viscerally for his various mistakes, but gets back to 0 and is strong enough to walk away, having learned from his mistakes and having found something (and someone) he wants to protect.
Can you ask much more of someone than that? Should you?
Maybe more importantly:
Can you ask much more of yourself than that? Should you? | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 13 | https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/movies/mark-wahlberg-and-james-caan-discuss-the-gambler.html | en | Mark Wahlberg and James Caan Discuss ‘The Gambler’ | [
"https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/12/07/arts/07GAMBLER1/07GAMBLER1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Margy Rochlin"
] | 2014-12-07T00:00:00 | Mark Wahlberg stars in a remake of “The Gambler,” a 1974 film with James Caan. The two actors met to discuss both films recently. | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/movies/mark-wahlberg-and-james-caan-discuss-the-gambler.html | LOS ANGELES — Last summer, Mark Wahlberg called James Caan to tell him that he was going to play the lead in a remake of “The Gambler,” the 1974 film that starred Mr. Caan.
“It was a respect thing,” Mr. Caan explained, adding that the conversation didn’t end there. Mr. Wahlberg told him that he and the new movie’s director, Rupert Wyatt, had discussed the possibility of casting Mr. Caan as a thug in the updated version. “What a horrible idea, a ridiculous distraction. Me, I thought, ‘Why even remind them?’ Then I think both came to their senses.”
Mr. Wahlberg, 43, and Mr. Caan, 74, have been friends since they met in 1999 on the set of “The Yards.” Mr. Caan played the corrupt owner of a company that repairs railway cars, and Mr. Wahlberg was his nephew, a soft-spoken ex-con hoping to turn his life around. At the time, Mr. Wahlberg was still relatively new to film, and he gravitated to the older actor, celebrated for his roles as charming bruisers in “The Godfather” and “Thief,” among other movies. Later, when Mr. Wahlberg invited Mr. Caan to his house for dinner, there on the wall alongside a collection of photographs of Mr. Wahlberg’s favorite masculine heroes — James Cagney, John Garfield, Steve McQueen — hung a beautiful shot of Mr. Caan from “The Gambler.”
“I got it a long time ago,” Mr. Wahlberg said. “But he thought I’d just put it up there for the day because he was coming over.” | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 87 | https://hmclaugh32.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-gambler-2015-rupert-wyatt-spoiler-alert/ | en | The Gambler (2015, Rupert Wyatt) SPOILER ALERT! | [
"https://hmclaugh32.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/the-gambler-movie-poster.jpg?w=192&h=300",
"https://hmclaugh32.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/thegambler.jpg?w=300&h=200",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://pixel.w... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-23T00:00:00 | I find Mark Wahlberg to be one of those ‘hit or miss’ performers. He’s starred in some of my all time favourite movies, (The Departed/The Fighter) yet appeared in equal measures in those I most detest (TED – need I say more?). When I caught wind of the ‘The Gambler’, a fast-paced crime drama based… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | The Big Picture | https://hmclaugh32.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-gambler-2015-rupert-wyatt-spoiler-alert/ | I find Mark Wahlberg to be one of those ‘hit or miss’ performers. He’s starred in some of my all time favourite movies, (The Departed/The Fighter) yet appeared in equal measures in those I most detest (TED – need I say more?). When I caught wind of the ‘The Gambler’, a fast-paced crime drama based on the 1970s classic, I had high hopes that it would deliver another strong performance from the unpredictable Wahlberg.
The film opens with the anti-hero Jim Bennett (Wahlberg) sitting by his grandfather’s deathbed. We do not know this yet, but Bennett is the male heir to one of the richest families in America. It is perhaps his own personal awareness of his ancestry wealth that encourages his expensive habit.
For despite his affluent upbringing, Jim Bennett has a dirty secret; an addiction that no amount of money can feed … he’s a gambler. When we see him next, he is throwing his money away in a seedy, underground casino. The cinematography Wyatt uses is almost ‘Fight Club’ esque, with harsh lighting and dramatic shadows used to convey the intensity in the room.
After losing $120k in two hands, you think things can’t get any worse for Bennett – but his problems have only just begun. We soon learn that this isn’t the first bad hand he’s suffered, as he already owes $240k to the Casino boss. On top of this, he owes a further $50,000 to a ruthless loan shark, accompanied by a complementary interest rate. With only seven days to clear the total debt, the storyline is born …
Jump back to reality and we discover that Bennett leads a fairly modest life as an English teacher. He does his best to keep his other life hidden from his students, but can’t contain his self-professed arrogance which breaks out in his classroom manner more and more frequently as his money problems spiral further out of control. Despite his unorthodox teaching methods, his students feel an attachment to him (pity perhaps) and act as his sole support unit throughout the film. From the blonde belle who lends her ear and her heart to the basketball star who rigs his game to help Wahlberg’s character win a bet.
The loan sharks are at a loss of their own, as they struggle to find a bargaining tool to threaten Bennett with. He is a man who does not care about anything – least himself.
The Gambler shamelessly plays into traditional stereotypes. From the Chinese operated casinos to the Black African Americans at the heart of the city’s corrupt underground. Then there is Wahlberg himself, portraying the spoilt white rich kid. Bennett is an individual that you are clearly meant to dislike, but I don’t know if this necessarily has the desired impact that the writers were going for.
On a whole, the character’s lack any kind of originality. This, in turn, makes it difficult for the viewer to engage with the storyline, as there is nothing particularly compelling to hold one’s attention.
Following a stroke of gamblers luck, Bennett finds himself flush with cash again. The director should have begun to wrap things up here, but in the penultimate scene as if to prove that he really is incurable, Bennett bets all the money he has on blackjack. Granted, he wins and doubles his money, but rather than feeling joy or relief on his part, I couldn’t help but think ‘WHAT A DICK?!’.
I won’t even attempt to disguise my disappointment with this film. The acting was bland, the storyline poor and worst of all, Wahlberg was lacking in muscles! It’s only saving grace was the soundtrack which is an electric mix of the nineties and noughties (think Pulp meets M83). Given the choice, I’d prefer to download the music to my iPod than sit through nearly two hours of nonsensical garbage again. Avoid if you can! | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 4 | https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/movies/mark-wahlberg-and-james-caan-discuss-the-gambler.html | en | Mark Wahlberg and James Caan Discuss ‘The Gambler’ | [
"https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/12/07/arts/07GAMBLER1/07GAMBLER1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Margy Rochlin"
] | 2014-12-07T00:00:00 | Mark Wahlberg stars in a remake of “The Gambler,” a 1974 film with James Caan. The two actors met to discuss both films recently. | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/movies/mark-wahlberg-and-james-caan-discuss-the-gambler.html | LOS ANGELES — Last summer, Mark Wahlberg called James Caan to tell him that he was going to play the lead in a remake of “The Gambler,” the 1974 film that starred Mr. Caan.
“It was a respect thing,” Mr. Caan explained, adding that the conversation didn’t end there. Mr. Wahlberg told him that he and the new movie’s director, Rupert Wyatt, had discussed the possibility of casting Mr. Caan as a thug in the updated version. “What a horrible idea, a ridiculous distraction. Me, I thought, ‘Why even remind them?’ Then I think both came to their senses.”
Mr. Wahlberg, 43, and Mr. Caan, 74, have been friends since they met in 1999 on the set of “The Yards.” Mr. Caan played the corrupt owner of a company that repairs railway cars, and Mr. Wahlberg was his nephew, a soft-spoken ex-con hoping to turn his life around. At the time, Mr. Wahlberg was still relatively new to film, and he gravitated to the older actor, celebrated for his roles as charming bruisers in “The Godfather” and “Thief,” among other movies. Later, when Mr. Wahlberg invited Mr. Caan to his house for dinner, there on the wall alongside a collection of photographs of Mr. Wahlberg’s favorite masculine heroes — James Cagney, John Garfield, Steve McQueen — hung a beautiful shot of Mr. Caan from “The Gambler.”
“I got it a long time ago,” Mr. Wahlberg said. “But he thought I’d just put it up there for the day because he was coming over.” | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 29 | https://filmgeeky.com/2017/03/22/review-the-gambler/ | en | Review – The Gambler | [
"https://filmgeekydotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/small-final.jpg",
"https://filmgeeky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/the-gambler-2014.png?w=860",
"https://filmgeeky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/mark-wahlberg-the-gambler.jpg?w=860",
"https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/7e4c11b6874ec8dde5c83ea3e8335796c0... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Film Geeky"
] | 2017-03-22T00:00:00 | The Gambler is a 2014 film directed by Rupert Wyatt (previously directed Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Escapist), and starring Mark Wahlberg. The film is a remake of a film of the same name, from 1974 which starred James Caan in the lead role. Wahlberg stars as Jim Bennett, grandson of… | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/7e4c11b6874ec8dde5c83ea3e8335796c0e7adc98c8da6e3aab7f9040207534e?s=32 | Film Geeky | Movie Reviews | New Movie Releases | https://filmgeeky.com/2017/03/22/review-the-gambler/ | The Gambler is a 2014 film directed by Rupert Wyatt (previously directed Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Escapist), and starring Mark Wahlberg. The film is a remake of a film of the same name, from 1974 which starred James Caan in the lead role.
Wahlberg stars as Jim Bennett, grandson of a wealthy Californian Ed (Geoge Kennedy), who is a former novelist, current university lecturer and total gambling addict wth rapidly increasing debts. His writing career has seen a single published, but bestselling novel from years earlier.
Whilst trying to solve his money problems, he lectures his class which includes Amy, a talented writer played by Bree Larson (Room) and Lamar (played by Anthony Kelley) an upcoming college basketball star.
As the film progresses, Bennett turns to different people to try and solve his money issues but with every opportunity to pay debt, comes money with which to gamble further.
Wahlberg and Larson both offer solid performances in the lead, but its the performances of Jessica Lange as his mother, and John Goodman as loan shark Frank that stood out for me.
It’s ok – I had hoped for more, but nothing wrong with it and in fairness in creating a lead character that even with their obvious flaws that you are still rooting for, Wahlberg and Wyatt have achieved. In honesty though, the thing I most took form it, was a desire to watch the original.
6/10 | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 1 | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_gambler_2015 | en | Rotten Tomatoes | [
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/rtlogo.9b892cff3fd.png",
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-01T00:00:00 | Literature professor Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) leads a secret life as a high-stakes gambler. Always a risk-taker, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Staying one step ahead, he pits his creditor against the operator of an illicit gambling ring while garnering the attention of Frank (John Goodman), a paternalistic loan shark. As his relationship with a student (Brie Larson) deepens, Bennett must risk everything for a second chance. | en | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/favicon.ico | Rotten Tomatoes | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_gambler_2015 | Let's keep in touch!
>
Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:
Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More
Sign me up No thanks | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 48 | https://www.tvguide.com/movies/the-gambler/2000181166/ | en | The Gambler | [
"https://content.internetvideoarchive.com/content/hdphotos/9354/009354/009354_916x515_999885_019.jpg",
"https://www.tvguide.com/a/img/resize/9af202baf9eedfdf604fba4055a9395e9614550b/catalog/provider/10/9/10-FCC5D402-610E-49F9-9B97-21867F6A7C17.png?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=300&width=200",
"https://www.tvguide.c... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Find out how to watch The Gambler. Stream The Gambler, watch trailers, see the cast, and more at TV Guide | en | /favicon.ico | TVGuide.com | https://www.tvguide.com/movies/the-gambler/2000181166/ | 55 Metascore
2014
1 hr 51 mins
Drama, Suspense
R
Watchlist
An English professor borrows money from a vicious gangster in an attempt to pay off his gambling debts. At the same time, he must contend with his disappointed mother and his affair with a precocious student. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 33 | https://www.rockerzine.com/2015/01/the-gambler-3-great-gambling-films-to-warm-up-with/ | en | The Gambler: 3 Great Gambling Films to Warm Up With | [
"https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/viewthroughconversion/866261114/?guid=ON&script=0",
"https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=579745882232006&ev=PageView&noscript=1",
"https://rockerzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/rocker-logo-v3.png",
"https://www.rockerzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Gambler74_1-1.... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jj4nJ1YEAp4?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-28T21:25:11+00:00 | It's cold outside! We tell you why it's no gamble to cuddle up with this trio of films. | en | Rockerzine | https://www.rockerzine.com/2015/01/the-gambler-3-great-gambling-films-to-warm-up-with/ | At the end of 2014, Mark Wahlberg starred in a remake of the 1974 film The Gambler which was released to mediocre reviews. Quoted at Rotten Tomatoes, reviewer David Kaplan went so far as to call the film’s script “insulting to the audience’s intelligence.” The general consensus seemed to be that despite a solid performance from Marky Mark, this was yet another underwhelming modern gambling flick. Indeed, for the most part, 21st century filmmakers just can’t seem to get this genre right, as project after project fails to capture the intrigue and atmosphere that made so many older gambling films irresistible.
So in the aftermath of the latest modern disappointment (and the latest blizzard keeping us tied to our Netflix! – Ed), here’s a look back at three of the gambling’s finest films.
The Gambler (1974)
We may as well start with the film on which the 2014 Wahlberg movie was based. The 1974 version of The Gambler was a gritty and intense project written by the notorious James Toback, who used it as a creative outlet to deal with his own gambling issues. Essentially a classic story of gambling addiction, the film covers the struggle of Alex Freed (James Caan), a literature professor who borrows money from his mother and girlfriend and then gambles it away while burrowing deeper into problems with all the wrong people.
Though the premise of The Gambler was nothing particularly exciting, its background and execution resulted in it gaining a place among the shortlist of classic gambling films. Loosely based on the Fyodor Dostoyevsky short novel of the same title, it managed to carry a certain sense of the eternal struggle of the gambler. There’s an element to the project that lets you feel Freed’s dilemma, and through it Toback’s, and even Dostoyevsky’s. This is due in large part to the wonderful work of Caan, which in turn was one reason the 2014 film didn’t quite hold up. Mark Wahlberg, if anything, is probably underrated as an actor, and his skill was on full display in the recent film. But there’s no matching the work of Caan, whose casting kept the 1974 version from being ordinary and forgettable.
The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
Possibly the greatest poker film ever made, The Cincinnati Kid must be included in any discussion of the top gambling movies. Directed by Norman Jewison, the film tells the story of an up-and-coming poker star named Eric Stoner. Referred to as “the Kid” (played by Steve McQueen), who has a thirst to prove himself against the long-time master of the game nicknamed “The Man,” played by Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award winner Edward G. Robinson.
The film was great for its era, but where it excels is in its portrayal of the one-on-one drama that poker can foster. With internet casinos taking over the industry, this has become a foreign concept to many modern players, since they can reach an expert level at the game without ever meeting a live opponent. It’s simple enough to find a guide in getting started in online poker at a premier online site, learn and practice the basics, and gain experience in tournaments—all from a computer screen or mobile device. But, while this makes for solid at-home entertainment, it’s good to remember it does change the nature of the game. The Cincinnati Kid displays that difference in its purest form, filling us with nostalgia with its dim New Orleans casino settings. Watching the almost sport-like competitiveness unfold, is refreshing and educational for a generation that grew up playing online and watching televised tournaments.
The Hustler (1961) | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 8 | https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240808-multiverse-fallacy/ | en | What is the 'reverse gambler's fallacy' theory that philosophers say may be wrong about the multiverse theory? | [
"https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/08/08/multiverse-fallacy/00_m.jpg",
"https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/08/08/multiverse-fallacy/001.png",
"https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/04/03/universe-conscious-set-conditions-life/00_m.jpg",
"https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/08/08/multiverse-fallacy/002.jpg",
"https://i.gzn.jp/img/2024/08/08/multi... | [] | [] | [
"news",
"blog",
"internet",
"IT",
"software",
"hardware",
"web service",
"food",
"mobile",
"game",
"anime",
"note",
"GIGAZINE"
] | null | [] | 2024-08-08T08:00:00+09:00 | The multiverse theory is a theory in theoretical physics that claims that there are multiple universes other than the one we live in, and is discussed in the fields of physics, philosophy, and logic. At this time, philosophers have explained that one of the reasons used by multiverse theorists contains a fundamental error called the ' reverse gambler's fallacy .' Many physicists assume we must live in a multiverse – but their basic maths may be wrong https://theconversation.com/many-physicists-assume-we-must-live-in-a-multiverse-but-their-basic-maths-may-be-wrong-216106 The physics of the world we live in sometimes seems finely tuned for life. In the book ' A Fortunate Universe Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos ' published by Geraint F. Lewis of the University of Sydney and others, they point out that if the fundamental constants and fundamental laws of physics in this world were just a little different in value, the story on Earth would be fundamentally different, and life like ours would not be able to survive. For example, if the hypothetical dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe were just a little stronger than it is now, matter would not be able to condense, stars and planets would not be born, and life would not be able to exist. The theory that the universe has 'consciousness' and has made adjustments that are favorable for the birth of life is being seriously debated - GIGAZINE A commonly used explanation for why physics seems fine-tuned is the multiverse theory. Multiverse theorists believe that we live in one of many universes, and that other universes have different physics values. Life could not have arisen in such a universe, but there is a small probability that a universe could have arisen where all the values happened to be just right for life to arise, and that universe is ours. The theory of the multiverse has been considered a plausible explanation for the fine-tuning of physics, but Philip Gough, an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in the UK, points out in his book Why? The Purpose of the Universe that multiverse theories 'commit the reverse gambler's fallacy.' The ' gambler's fallacy ' refers to, for example, when flipping a coin and getting heads three times in a row, thinking, 'Heads and tails are both 50/50, so if I'm biased towards heads three times in a row, the next time I'll get tails will be more likely.' Since the observed results are always independent stochastic processes, the probability up to that point should have no bearing, but a series of memories can cause the calculation of probability to be incorrect. The 'reverse gambler's fallacy,' named by philosopher Ian Hacking in relation to the gambler's fallacy, is literally the reverse of the gambler's fallacy. When you flip a coin three times in a row and get tails, you think, 'Since the probability converges to get an equal number of heads and tails, if you get three tails now, then someone must have flipped a coin many times and got heads in a row.' This refers to the idea that when a rare result is obtained from a random process, the person must have tried enough times to get that rare result. Both the gambler's fallacy and the reverse gambler's fallacy are based on the idea that 'probabilities converge.' However, small probabilities are merely 'unlikely to occur,' and are not abnormal when they do occur. Furthermore, a certain probability is always constant regardless of previous actions or results. Goff argues that multiverse theorists fall into the reverse gambler's fallacy when they claim that our universe is filled with the right numbers for life. Because this is probabilistically impossible, there must be many other universes in which the numbers don't line up properly. The prevailing scientific theory is that the physical numbers governing the universe have remained constant since the Big Bang. In this case, there are two ways of thinking: either it is an incredible coincidence that our universe happens to have numbers suitable for life, or nature is driven by some unseen, inherent principle to develop life. Goff argues that it is too difficult to dismiss as coincidence, and in his book he presents a theory of the 'purpose of the universe' and discusses its impact on the meaning and purpose of humanity. | en | GIGAZINE | https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240808-multiverse-fallacy/ | The multiverse theory is a theory in theoretical physics that claims that there are multiple universes other than the one we live in, and is discussed in the fields of physics, philosophy, and logic. At this time, philosophers have explained that one of the reasons used by multiverse theorists contains a fundamental error called the ' reverse gambler's fallacy .'
Many physicists assume we must live in a multiverse – but their basic maths may be wrong
https://theconversation.com/many-physicists-assume-we-must-live-in-a-multiverse-but-their-basic-maths-may-be-wrong-216106
The physics of the world we live in sometimes seems finely tuned for life. In the book ' A Fortunate Universe Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos ' published by Geraint F. Lewis of the University of Sydney and others, they point out that if the fundamental constants and fundamental laws of physics in this world were just a little different in value, the story on Earth would be fundamentally different, and life like ours would not be able to survive. For example, if the hypothetical dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe were just a little stronger than it is now, matter would not be able to condense, stars and planets would not be born, and life would not be able to exist.
The theory that the universe has 'consciousness' and has made adjustments that are favorable for the birth of life is being seriously debated - GIGAZINE
A commonly used explanation for why physics seems fine-tuned is the multiverse theory. Multiverse theorists believe that we live in one of many universes, and that other universes have different physics values. Life could not have arisen in such a universe, but there is a small probability that a universe could have arisen where all the values happened to be just right for life to arise, and that universe is ours.
The theory of the multiverse has been considered a plausible explanation for the fine-tuning of physics, but Philip Gough, an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in the UK, points out in his book Why? The Purpose of the Universe that multiverse theories 'commit the reverse gambler's fallacy.'
The '
gambler's fallacy ' refers to, for example, when flipping a coin and getting heads three times in a row, thinking, 'Heads and tails are both 50/50, so if I'm biased towards heads three times in a row, the next time I'll get tails will be more likely.' Since the observed results are always independent stochastic processes, the probability up to that point should have no bearing, but a series of memories can cause the calculation of probability to be incorrect.
The 'reverse gambler's fallacy,' named by philosopher Ian Hacking in relation to the gambler's fallacy, is literally the reverse of the gambler's fallacy. When you flip a coin three times in a row and get tails, you think, 'Since the probability converges to get an equal number of heads and tails, if you get three tails now, then someone must have flipped a coin many times and got heads in a row.' This refers to the idea that when a rare result is obtained from a random process, the person must have tried enough times to get that rare result.
Both the gambler's fallacy and the reverse gambler's fallacy are based on the idea that 'probabilities converge.' However, small probabilities are merely 'unlikely to occur,' and are not abnormal when they do occur. Furthermore, a certain probability is always constant regardless of previous actions or results.
Goff argues that multiverse theorists fall into the reverse gambler's fallacy when they claim that our universe is filled with the right numbers for life. Because this is probabilistically impossible, there must be many other universes in which the numbers don't line up properly.
The prevailing scientific theory is that the physical numbers governing the universe have remained constant since the Big Bang. In this case, there are two ways of thinking: either it is an incredible coincidence that our universe happens to have numbers suitable for life, or nature is driven by some unseen, inherent principle to develop life. Goff argues that it is too difficult to dismiss as coincidence, and in his book he presents a theory of the 'purpose of the universe' and discusses its impact on the meaning and purpose of humanity.
Aug 08, 2024 08:00:00 in Science, Posted by log1e_dh | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 72 | https://themoviespoiler.com/2015Spoilers/Gambler.html | en | Movie Spoiler for the film | [
"https://themoviespoiler.com/2014Posters/TheGambler.jpg",
"https://themoviespoiler.com/Images/spoiler.jpg",
"http://media.fastclick.net/w/get.media?sid=15941&tp=7&d=s&c=1&vcm_acv=1.4",
"http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/ad12539a.cgi/ns/v=2.3S/sz=160x600A/",
"https://themoviespoiler.com/Images/Facebook.png... | [] | [] | [
"THE GAMBLER",
"2015",
"Mark Wahlberg",
"Jessica Lange",
"John Goodman",
"spoiler",
"spoilers",
"Film",
"Endings",
"dvd",
"video",
"Cinema",
"Theater",
"Current",
"Playing",
"Movie Spoilers"
] | null | [] | null | A brief synopsis and the ending will be revealed for the movie - THE GAMBLER | null | THE GAMBLER
NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy
Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) is sitting by his grandfather Ed (George Kennedy), who is lying on his deathbed. Ed asks Jim what he'll be worth in this world when he's leaving him with nothing. He leaves Jim with the thought that now he has become just like his grandfather during his own adult life.
After Ed's funeral, Jim goes to a casino. He spots a young woman (Brie Larson), who looks at him with a bit of surprise. Jim goes to deal his cards, and he ends up losing money. He is approached by a loan shark named Neville Baraka (Michael K. Williams), who comments on his losses. Jim owes $240,000 to a man named Lee (Alvin Ing), who runs an underground casino ring. Jim borrows $50,000 from Neville and gives $40,000 to Lee while he takes the rest to try and win more money back. This plan fails, and Jim is given seven days to pay back the debt or he's dead meat.
Jim teaches English literature at college. He's giving a lecture on Shakespeare and he calls out one student, Dexter (Emory Cohen), who is a tennis player that doesn't apply his talents because he is actually good, but because, according to Dexter, of his desire to join the tennis team because the tennis players had really good weed. Jim also calls out Amy Phillips, the young woman from the casino, and says she is the best writer in the class and thinks of her as a prodigy, but wonders why she chooses to sit in the middle of the class instead of the front where she belongs.
Jim visits another loan shark named Frank (John Goodman). He is willing to loan Jim money, but only if he tells Frank that he is not a man. Jim refuses to do so and he leaves.
During one of his classes, Jim calls out a student named Lamar Allen (Anthony Kelley), who is texting during class. He makes Lamar stay after, and they discuss Lamar wanting to be a professional basketball star. Lamar is currently the star player on the college basketball team, but Lamar wants people to see him for more than what is expected of him.
Jim's mother Roberta (Jessica Lange) catches him in the tub watching one of Lamar's games and asks him if he put money on the game. She tells Jim that she got a call from a gangster asking for money. Although he refuses her help, she goes with him to the bank and takes out the money needed to pay off his debt. Roberta gives Jim the money, and they part bitterly.
Amy drives up by Jim while he sits at a bus stop and invites him in the car. He goes with her and they spend the day together, semi-romantically. She learns what a messed up person he is, while he admits to her that he does want to be happy and that he has desires in his life. They later go to the casino, where Jim plays with Roberta's money and loses every last bill.
Jim spends what little time he has left drinking away his sorrows and trying to pawn off his watch. After he unsuccessfully tries to make a negotiation, Neville and his goons abduct Jim. They bring him to an empty building where Neville gives Jim his last option. Since Neville knows about Lamar and his talent on the court, he tells Jim to convince the boy to win a game by a margin of seven points or less, or else Neville will kill Amy.
Jim approaches Lamar and tells him he'll get $150,000 if he goes along with the scheme. Later, Jim goes to meet with Frank again at a bar. Frank tells Jim that much of the accomplishments in the country and most of the world are won by having a "fuck you" attitude towards life. With this approach, Jim can go on living a little easier. Frank then lends Jim $260,000 to wager in the game.
Jim then pays Lee a visit and demands that he stake him. Lee's thugs assault Jim, but Lee eventually agrees to stake Jim $150,000.
The day of the basketball game comes, with Neville and his boys watching on TV while Jim sits in during the game. Lamar starts off excellently, making Neville think something is wrong, until Lamar starts to play poorly and gets himself benched. After a while, Lamar is brought back into the game, and he succeeds in winning the game while still shaving points. Jim finally manages to pay Neville back and is relieved to never have to see him again.
Jim then convinces Frank and Lee to come together at an underground gambling den. He puts in all his money on black to play for the two men. After a spin, the ball lands on black, and Jim's debt to Frank and Lee is gone. He leaves the den, declaring he is not a gambler, and Frank follows him in his car. Frank offers Jim overpayment since Jim gave Frank more money than what was owed, but Jim replies, "Fuck you". Jim runs all the way through the city as the morning comes until he gets to Amy's apartment. | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 25 | https://www.openlettersmonthlyarchive.com/hammer-and-thump/interview-the-gambler-director-rupert-wyatt | en | Interview: The Gambler Director Rupert Wyatt — Open Letters Monthly | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c539375778897170ed29e09/1553970821283-7U1V08E6XANYJLTA1QNH/favicon.ico?format=100w | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c539375778897170ed29e09/1553970821283-7U1V08E6XANYJLTA1QNH/favicon.ico?format=100w | [
"http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/hammerandthump/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/250-202x300.jpeg",
"http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/hammerandthump/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Rupert-Wyatt-Gambler-Premieres-Hollywood-Part-_NT14pWeuUsl-195x300.jpg",
"http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/hammerandthump/wp-content/uploa... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Locke Peterseim"
] | 2014-12-25T08:39:25-05:00 | I went into The Gambler with every bit of trepidation you’re probably feeling right now as you look at that poster: “Eh, Mark Wahlberg? Gambling movie? Remake?” But I found this new version of The Gambler, sharply written by William Monahan (based on James Toba | en | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c539375778897170ed29e09/1553970821283-7U1V08E6XANYJLTA1QNH/favicon.ico?format=100w | Open Letters Monthly | https://www.openlettersmonthlyarchive.com/hammer-and-thump/interview-the-gambler-director-rupert-wyatt | I went into The Gambler with every bit of trepidation you’re probably feeling right now as you look at that poster: “Eh, Mark Wahlberg? Gambling movie? Remake?”
But I found this new version of The Gambler, sharply written by William Monahan (based on James Toback’s original 1974 script) and vividly directed by Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) absolutely riveting, more due to the script’s intelligence than its gambling scenes. (The film spends almost as much time in the classroom as it does at the gaming tables.)
Wahlberg, who produced the film, is in the James Caan role as Jim Bennett, a burned-out, self-loathing college English professor who spends every spare moment and dime gambling on cards, sports, roulette wheels, you name it.
Naturally, as in the original film, his self-destructive drive lands Bennett in deep financial trouble with various underworld figures, including Michael K. Williams and John Goodman (both brilliant), which in turns further strains his already chilly relationship with his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange). Along the way down, Bennett also inadvertently stumbles into a possibly redemptive relationship with a student (the always excellent Brie Larson).
I hope to write further at length about The Gambler in the near future, but for now let me say that even though the film is getting hammered by critics and ignored at the box-office, for whatever it’s worth, I personally loved the film a lot–it’s one of my favorites of 2014.
I sat down with The Gambler‘s Rupert Wyatt in Chicago a few weeks ago to talk about what he as a director brings to a “for hire” project like this; how the remake is fundamentally different from the 1974 original,;and how you make and sell smart, challenging films in the current Film Industry climate.
The Gambler is playing now in theaters everywhere.
_________
I have to tell you, when we had a morning screening a few weeks ago, I almost blew it off. I was busy, it was an inconvenient time, and honestly I felt like I knew what the film was going to be and wasn’t that interested.
But I went and came out of the screening electrified by how much I loved it.
Rupert Wyatt: It’s a different film. It’s interesting the way people’s preconceptions of what this movie is are different from what the movie really is.
How did you get involved in the project?
Wyatt: I was working on my own thing—coming off Rise of the Planet of the Apes I was focused very much on my own work, something I’m going back to right now. It was taking longer than I hoped to get up and running, but I’d heard about this script, heard about how good it was. I live in LA, so I’m kind of in the belly of the beast—when scripts go around town and to agencies, you get a notion of what’s good or not.
This project kept coming up, and then I heard Mark was involved and wanted me to read it. He’s an actor I’ve always respected and found really intriguing, because he’s obviously a movie star, but there’s something about him I find quite alluring because he’s a very still actor. Some people read him as understated, but I love that—I think he’s like a Spencer Tracy or even Brian Cox who I worked with on The Escapist, where they really underplay things very well, but you’re still drawn to them.
So I eventually read the script and fell in love with it because it was something I could see. There were other projects I’d read that I liked the idea of and what I could do with them, but I wanted to rebuild them. But that’s hard in the case of this and those projects, where they’ve already been originated. So it’s a different aspect of one’s career. As a filmmaker, I love building things from the ground up, but on this film and Apes, I came on and worked basically as a tailor—you put your stamp on it, but it’s already been built.
To that end, with William Monahan’s script written and Wahlberg driving the project, what do you bring to the film as the director?
Wyatt: It’s all about the transition to the screen. In this case, I wanted to do very little in terms of what was on the page with the characters and character interactions. But we did make changes with situations and physical circumstances.
For example, John Goodman’s character Frank was to first meet Mark’s character Jim at Dan Tana’s, a well-known LA restaurant. I understood what Bill was doing there, because it represented to a certain extent who he perceived Frank to be, the particular kind of old-school person who goes to Dan Tana’s.
I thought it would be more interesting and subvert the essence of that character a bit more if I put him in a schvitz in a spa. And that might make Jim more uncomfortable—it’s hot and sweaty and he’s being grilled. As a filmmaker to come in and make those changes, it’s always a very intrinsic thing to directing. But you’re still coming in and taking something that preexists and making the transition, rather than me sitting in front of blank page saying, “Okay, I’m going to put this in a Russian spa.”
The film is very stylish, but unlike so many over-styled films these days, I felt the stylism really worked to enhance the story. I also noticed how much architecture figures into the film visually.
Wyatt: It’s interesting you picked up on that, because I love LA for its diversity. I made a rule with Greig Fraser, our director of photography, that if we had a palm tree in the shot we’d move the camera. Because I just didn’t want the preconception of what Los Angeles can be, but instead seek out the more interesting parts of it.
I like to tell stories that are as inherently visual as possible, especially with a script like this that is so dense and verbose. To put Jim, who’s at a really, really tenuous place in his life, in a house that is literally on sticks, so there’s a danger of his world crumbling around at any moment, I think that is as much a part of storytelling as the language that comes out of his mouth.
The original film with James Caan feels like such a personal howl from James Toback. Did you have any trepidation about remaking Toback’s tale of his own addiction?
Wyatt: There was no trepidation in that I knew very early on from reading the script that this was not going to be treading the same ground as the original—if it had been, I probably wouldn’t have taken the job. For me the point of remakes is coming at things from a fresh angle. The fundamental difference between the two movies is that the original Karel Reisz movie is a study in addiction, born of Toback’s own experiences.
This one is much more of a quest—a guy who’s looking to get out and is using gambling as a means to escape. It’s not about a guy who’s circling the drain and unable to escape his demise. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the story of addiction in a way that other filmmakers or storytellers perhaps could have because I don’t have that personal experience.
To me, your film didn’t read as a cautionary tale about addiction but rather it’s about a process of self-destruction—Jim lets fortune decide his fate, taking all responsibility off him—the universe decides whether he lives or dies.
Wyatt: There is the great myth of the samurai where the samurai chooses the place of his own death. There’s conformity to that in that it affords the samurai a certain element of control even though it means self-destruction. There’s a great book, The Dice Man [1971, by George Cockcroft writing as Luke Rhinehart]–it’d make an amazing film—about a guy who lives his life by the role of the dice. If he rolls a two, he’ll make himself a cup of coffee—if he rolls a six, he’ll go downstairs and kill the gardener.
It takes all elements of free-will out of the equation. That to me was Mark’s character—a guy who says, “I’m going to bet my life, because all these things I have, that people aspire to have, they don’t make me happy, so I’m going to blow it all up, put it all on black. And I might die in the process, but hopefully it will be my escape valve and afford me a better life.” That to me is quite an aspirational story, even though it seems an odd thing to say. It’s a guy who’s looking for his own freedom.
It’s such an exhilaratingly smart film and a very literary script. So how do you make this kind of film in the current Hollywood landscape and get people to see it?
Wyatt: Get Mark Wahlberg to be in it. That’s a glib answer, but I think in this day and age, especially with the new studio world, we are an exception to the rule. It’s a sad indictment on how mainstream movie-making is going, and why we’re seeing this amazing migration toward long-form television, which I think is the breeding ground of really, really interesting storytelling. It’s kind of where the novel was a century ago. Great cable TV like Deadwood or The Wire; that platform is allowing filmmakers to do things that were happening in the ‘70s in American cinema.
Whereas modern Hollywood is finding itself in this amazing crosswords where the firework displays of big tent-pole movies are now the majority, and there will be tipping point, a moment where people just turn away. There are still great films being made, they’re just being made out of the mainstream.
In some ways, what’s been afforded me with the rare opportunity to make this movie, to make a challenging film in the mainstream, is a testament to Paramount and Mark as a movie star who’s prepared to take his value and put it into something that is a tough sell. It isn’t necessarily what mainstream audiences are searching out, but hopefully we’re a breath of fresh air. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 24 | https://www.avclub.com/mark-wahlberg-s-remake-of-the-gambler-isn-t-really-abou-1798182246 | en | Mark Wahlberg’s remake of The Gambler isn’t really about gambling | [
"https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2014/12/14223839/tam3hoc1lthiskktniik.jpg"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2014-12-18T11:00:00+00:00 | Mark Wahlberg’s remake of The Gambler isn’t really about gambling | en | AV Club | https://www.avclub.com/mark-wahlberg-s-remake-of-the-gambler-isn-t-really-abou-1798182246 | “I’m not a gambler,” insists Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), the title character of The Gambler, though both his actions and the name of the film chronicling them beg to differ. English professor by day, wannabe high roller by night, and shiftless, washed-up novelist by both, Jim makes his first appearance at a shady Los Angeles gambling den. Here, in the film’s opening scene, he wins big at the blackjack table, doubles down and loses it all, wins again on money staked to him by a loan shark, and then blows all of that on another foolish bet—all within 10 minutes of running time, and without a second of hesitation. None of that looks like the type of behavior one might expect from a man who doesn’t have a problem. Yet as Jim gets deeper and deeper into trouble, and the details of his charmed life shift into focus, an alternate explanation for such reckless wagering presents itself. Maybe Jim isn’t a gambler. Maybe he’s just a rich asshole with a death wish.
The Gambler draws both its name and its basic plot structure from a 1974 James Toback movie, which itself was a loose adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. Both of those works were very plainly about addiction, presenting antiheroes whose compulsive betting was a reflection of their authors’ shared vice. By contrast, this remake, slickly directed by Rupert Wyatt (Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes) and loudly written by William Monahan (The Departed), has refashioned the same story into a swaggering California crime comedy about a golden boy rebelling against his own privilege, mostly by flushing every dollar he can get his hands on down the toilet. Blackjack is more of a noose than a needle for this self-destructive blowhard, and if that sounds less dramatic than the tale of a man who just can’t walk away from the table, it is significantly funnier.
Wahlberg excels at braggadocio, and that, thankfully, is Monahan’s specialty: Early scenes of Jim pacing around his classroom, berating his students for their lack of natural talent, play like little more than blatant showcases for the screenwriter’s colorful shit talk. Monahan structures The Gambler as a series of punchy conversations, counting down the days until Jim has to shell out thousands of dollars to both the stoic kingpin Mister Lee (Alvin Ing) and impatient gangster Neville (Michael Kenneth Williams). As the deadline nears, our hero pulls a couple of star athletes into his dilemma, hits up his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange), and considers borrowing what he owes from Frank (John Goodman), a truly ruthless lender who warns him to find another way. Goodman delivers his spooky-amusing speeches with relish, as though he were auditioning about a decade late for The Departed.
A more serious movie would treat the looming threat of debt collection as a source of mounting suspense. But even as Jim blows every lifeline he receives, The Gambler keeps its cool; it’s the most casual downward spiral in recent memory. There’s a lot of humor in the character’s incorrigible nonchalance: When Neville comes knocking for his money, Jim absently suggests that he stake him more gambling capital, and Williams conveys a disbelief so deep it almost looks like admiration. Less compelling is the quasi-romantic relationship between Jim and his sharpest pupil, played by overqualified Short Term 12 star Brie Larson. While basically the inverse of a certain tiresome archetype—let’s call her the stable brainy dream girl—the character still exists primarily to shove our male hero into a sea change.
For all the pop and flavor of the tough-guy dialogue, neither Monahan nor Wyatt seem especially interested in establishing an authentic atmosphere for their world of underground casinos and credit-line crooks. (One gets the impression that The Gambler is set in Los Angeles, as opposed to Vegas or Atlantic City, for chiefly financial reasons.) But maybe that’s just because, again, this isn’t really a gambling movie. It just uses the high stakes of blackjack and roulette to goose its not-exactly-relatable story of someone who has everything—money, acclaim, charisma, good looks—but still feels like he has nothing to lose. In any case, none of the gambles Jim makes over the course of the movie are as ballsy as the film’s casting strategy. Will audiences really buy Mark Wahlberg as a wordsmith too brilliant for academia? Smart money says no. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 73 | https://thefilmstage.com/rupert-wyatt-on-going-from-apes-to-the-gambler-deer-hunter-inspiration-pitfalls-of-casting-process-and-more/ | en | Rupert Wyatt on Going From ‘Apes’ to ‘The Gambler,’ ‘Deer Hunter’ Inspiration, Pitfalls of Casting Process, and More | [
"https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/filmstage-logo-350px-jm.png",
"https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/one-eyed-jacks-marlon-brando-360x240.jpeg",
"https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Cloud-1-360x240.jpg",
"https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sc... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jordan Raup"
] | 2014-12-23T20:00:01-05:00 | "I made this rule which is if we see a palm tree in the frame, we'll move the camera. We just didn't want to play to the preconceived notion of what LA was and that was because I wanted to give LA a heartbeat and make it a slightly warmer place." | en | The Film Stage - Your Spotlight On Cinema | https://thefilmstage.com/rupert-wyatt-on-going-from-apes-to-the-gambler-deer-hunter-inspiration-pitfalls-of-casting-process-and-more/ | After helping relaunch the Planet of the Apes franchise, director Rupert Wyatt could have seemingly jumped to any number of major blockbusters, but for his follow-up he instead took on something of a smaller scale. While still staying in the studio system, he set his sights on a remake of the James Caan-led drama The Gambler, this time featuring Mark Wahlberg in the lead and a William Monahan script.
I recently got a chance to sit down with the director for a one-on-one interview during the junket in New York. We discussed his use of diegetic sound, what attracted him to the project, working with less CGI, his collaboration with Greg Fraser, casting Brie Larson and John Goodman, capturing a different side of LA, what movies he’s looking forward to, and much more. Check out the full conversation below, which has mild spoilers.
I first wanted to touch on the use of diegetic sound in the movie. Almost every music cue you make sure the characters are actually listening to it. For example, the “Creep” cover and you go past the choir. How did that come about?
Yeah, I like the abrupt nature of the cut-offs, in the sense that we were constantly disrupting Jim’s life, but also The Last Picture Show did it, actually, where a lot of seemingly source music plays out in the scene itself on the radio. I’ve just found that another way of getting the audience into the actual scene itself rather than playing out a soundtrack so they feel like they are actually part of a whole, if that makes sense.
Yes. That specific one, the cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” was one you knew you were going to use during production?
Yeah, I did. I shot the scene to it and it just tonally worked so well. It created this melancholy and this sense of sadness at the parting and what he was doing, which was actually, “I need to walk away from you right now. Hopefully one day I can come back to you.” Of course he can’t tell her why so we tried other things against it just to see. I actually found out the day we were shooting — Jacqueline West, our costume designer had designed The Social Network. When we were shooting she said, “Oh, that’s the piece of music that was used on the trailer!” I was like, “Oh, crap.” But then I figured it was the trailer, it wasn’t the movie. We couldn’t find anything better.
Watching the trailer, and then coming to see the movie you don’t expect the ten-minute monologue Wahlberg’s character gives, along with the scene after that. You don’t normally see that in a studio Hollywood movie. Is that something that attracted you early on?
Yeah, very much. Only because it does set out his agenda very clearly very early on. It does it in a context that’s quite challenging, both from the point of view from getting an audience to really engage with a scene that runs that long and is that dialogue-driven, and frankly that static. If you’re in a lecture scene there’s not that many places to go, certainly from the audience’s point of view. So I saw that as a great challenge. It’s a different set of rules making a film like this than a more action-driven film.
Getting to that point, going from The Escapist to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, was it a relief to work with less CGI? I know you worked directly with the actors on mo-cap there, but how was getting back to more independent sensibilities?
Well, the only part of the CG work that became so intrinsic to the process for me on Apes was the post-production process. The actual making of the movie was no different. Our actors, as you say, playing the apes were there on set. The technology around that, WETA’s cameras and the stuff the WETA guys did, part of their strengths is that they keep that away from the filmmaking process. We don’t have to step on their toes and vice versa. They were very invisible, but obviously when you get into the post and you are transferring a human actor into an ape, there are so many stages to doing that, all of which are a little bit like making a movie over again. You have to rebuild the performance and the action, but retaining the honesty of what was on the screen, because Andy [Serkis], in the case of Caesar, if he picks up a glass of water, his arm is a human arm. If an ape does that, an ape is only going to be doing that [shortens his arm and picks up water bottle] and there’s only so much animation you can do with the length of his arm to actually make it sort of just physically work. So then obviously in post you have to then reengineer slightly the body form and that can change the performance. So you’re always working to keep it to Andy’s performance, so that was a challenge and very time-consuming, whereas a film like this it was nice to get back to kind of, this is theater.
Your collaboration with Greg Fraser — who is a fantastic DP, and his career is kind of now skyrocketing with Star Wars and Foxcatcher — how did that come about? Did you approach him specifically?
I did, yeah. I had seen his work in Killing Them Softly and Bright Star, the Jane Campion movie, and Zero Dark Thirty and Snow White [and the Huntsman]. He’s very diverse and his style is across all of those movies but he has a very clear eye. He’s funny because he’s an Aussie so he’s very pragmatic and down-to-Earth and doesn’t like to convolute anything whether it be conversation or the scene itself. But he’s a real poet, although he’ll never admit to it he has this amazing artistic eye which is wonderful to have on set.
The shot after Wahlberg’s character gets rid of the $260,000 again, you have the Goodfellas/Vertigo-esque short where you’re zooming and pushing out. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Ah, yes. By the window.
Was that something he brought up or did you want to do that shot?
That was me, actually, only because I wanted to convey — not dissimilar to Goodfellas — that the world is changing for him now. So, yeah. That said, he executed it well.
With Brie Larson, she really clicks with Mark Wahlberg. Had you seen Short Term 12?
Oh, yeah. That’s where I first saw her. I had seen Scott Pilgrim actually as well and 21 Jump Street and Rampart I had seen. But Short Term 12 is where I saw truly how extraordinary she is.
For her audition process, I remember it was extensive, just reporting on it for our site. Which scene did you have her try out first?
Well, I always knew I wanted her. I didn’t have anybody else in mind. But of course filmmaking is a collaborative process, so there were people we had to see, needed to see, the protocol was such that we should see. You can always get stuff from those meetings which is really good for the part, but from the get-go I wanted her. I admire Tarantino in the sense that when he writes something he has a very clear idea of who he wants. He writes a part for somebody and then goes after them. That just gets rid of all the bullshit. In terms of, there’s a lot of hustling that goes along with casting and you can find yourself ending up with the wrong person for all the wrong reasons. It just made so much sense to me to cast someone like Brie, who is such an old soul and pretty mature for her age. It made that relationship so much more understandable. It was less Lolita and much more about kindred spirits. There are not many actresses 24 or 25 in Hollywood that can bring that. Well, there may be, but I knew that with Brie I knew I was going to get that.
With John Goodman, how did his character’s design come about? Introducing him shaving his head is great.
Yeah. I asked him when we first met if he was up for it. He said normally no, because actor’s don’t like to shave their heads. You can’t work for six months. But he was going to take a break, so he said, “Yep, let’s do it.” He was very open to ideas and he is a terrific guy.
There’s a lot of little oddities in the film, like Mark Wahlberg twirling the umbrella at the tennis court.
That was actually Mark. It wonderful because he’s this fish out of water in so many different environments in this film. He’s always an outsider, so it was sort of great. I wanted to stick him up at the top of the umpire’s chair, but he took the umbrella up with him.
There’s also the great shot showing the collapse of his psyche with the house, the flood. Was that in the script?
No, that was something we added and my effects guys who I’ve worked with since my short film days actually, Atomic Arts, did all the effects on this film. They did some of the CG on Apes. Not the apes themselves, but some background work. We built that sequence from scratch. We did a Lidar shoot, which is this amazing invention where it sends out an infrared signal on a 360-degree basis so you can stick it in the middle of this room and in a couple of seconds it would map this entire room and then you feed it into a computer and it gives you the 3D model, in this case, this room. So we did that with a location outside Mark’s house and then we built digitally the flood. I liked the idea that it was representative of obviously not only the cleaning of the stables, but it leads us into the third act and Mark’s journey upwards, but also the idea this his world is essentially that vulnerable.
That also comes into play with the seven-day countdown. I loved the lettering and the style. Was that in the post-production process?
Yeah, it was, our title guys. I know I wanted to play with the seven-day, that was something, again, we added to structure the film a little bit more and chapter it like a book because with Jim being a novelist it seemed to make sense. The actual design of the day cards we decided to make them a little more integral into the frame.
When you were on set, did you know the actual shots that were going to be incorporated?
Yeah, most of them. Some of them fell by the wayside. Therefore we needed to put the day shots over frames we didn’t initially imagine. The girl dancing in the strip club, that was always going to be a day shot.
With the underground gambling area in Koreatown you make it quite an extensive journey. In some movies, it’s just a backdoor and someone says a password or phrase and goes in. With your film, it’s this actual descent and you never know what’s around the next corner.
Well, my main influence on that whole thing is the journey De Niro takes at the end of Deer Hunter where he’s seeking out Christopher Walken‘s character and he’s taken to the journey through hell to the Russian roulette scene, so that’s what I based it on. Of course with our case we’re going through the underworld of Koreatown and just what lies beneath these closed doors. I like this idea as he journeys he goes through the lower level aspect of the gambling, whether it be the poker machines, then gradually gets to more and more opulent surroundings, even though they are pretty hellish, right to the dragon room at the end, which is the high stakes room, which was all based on research.
This is a great LA movie, which is not in the sense of just showing the Hollywood sign. As you say, you see Koreatown but other areas not widely captured.
Yeah, Greg and I made this rule which is if we see a palm tree in the frame, we’ll move the camera. We just didn’t want to play to the preconceived notion of what LA was and that was because I wanted to give LA a heartbeat and make it a slightly warmer place. More often that not that kind of white light of Los Angeles and the valley lit up at night from Mulholland Drive, that sort of gridlock Less Than Zero shot is always peoples’ pre-conceived notion of what LA is. Of course it’s much more than that and it’s culturally very rich and architecturally incredibly diverse. The districts are so self-contained. They are all like multiple cities within one city. So, as a journey, to journey through that was great because it’s like the seven circles of hell. They are all very different and they were color-coded and that was my way into each of those locations, was through the characters.
There’s another LA movie coming out this week, actually, Inherent Vice. Have you seen it yet?
[Shakes head indicating no]
Ah, Michael K. Williams was in that film too and both movies have this LA, like you said, not how you expect LA.
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing that. Also, Nightcrawler, which I haven’t see.
As a follow up to that, because Mark Wahlberg kind of broke out with Boogie Nights, PTA’s first movie, was that the first time you noticed him?
I’m trying to think, actually no. I think Basketball Diaries is where I first saw him. Was that before?
Yeah, a little bit.
Growing up not in the states I never knew Mark as Marky Mark or the underwear model or Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. That was before. I was elsewhere. That was not part of my pop culture. I’ve always known Mark as an actor first and foremost. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 32 | https://www.amazon.com/Gambler-Limited-Blu-Ray-Imprint-Collection/dp/B0956DSHNJ | en | Ray (Imprint Collection # 49) : Movies & TV | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/ATVPDKIKX0DER:141-2075768-0858464:DWWTMN65CR6S0ENN045X$uedata=s:%2Frd%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DDWWTMN65CR6S0ENN045X:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/gno/sprites/nav-sprite-global-1x-reorg-privacy._CB587940754_.png",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51zZI7u... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Amazon.com: The Gambler - Limited Edition Blu-Ray (Imprint Collection # 49) : Movies & TV | en | https://www.amazon.com/Gambler-Limited-Blu-Ray-Imprint-Collection/dp/B0956DSHNJ | Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 49 | https://crookedmarquee.com/classic-corner-the-gambler/ | en | Classic Corner: The Gambler — Crooked Marquee | [
"https://crookedmarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/avatars/531/1674774103-bpthumb.jpg",
"https://crookedmarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/gambler-poster-scaled.jpg",
"https://crookedmarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/gambler2-1024x576.jpg",
"https://crookedmarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/gambler3-... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/qRKDQ8qGdaU?feature=oembed"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jason Bailey"
] | 2021-04-30T09:00:00-07:00 | The 1974 drama offers an uncommonly insightful (and often unforgiving) peek into the mind of the compulsive gambler. | en | Crooked Marquee | https://crookedmarquee.com/classic-corner-the-gambler/ | “If all my bets were safe,” Axel Freed (James Caan) says near the end of Karel Reiz’s The Gambler, “there wouldn’t be any juice.” He’s talking to his bookie Hips (Paul Sorvino), explaining how if he wanted to, he could just win all the time – but there’s no fun in that. In the moment, it sounds like bluster, like a frequent loser making excuses. By the end of the picture, his assertion makes a lot more sense.
The Gambler is part of the Criterion Channel’s new program of gambling movies (it’s also streaming on Amazon Prime), alongside such all-timers as Bob le flambeur, The Hustler, House of Games, and California Split – which came out in 1974, the same year as The Gambler’s release. And of the 18 films included, those two seem to best understand the psychology of the compulsive gambler, and within that, his inherent nihilism.
Axel is already “down” when we meet him – indeed, one of the film’s best qualities is the sense that we’re joining this story already in progress, so it immediately immerses us in this world, and expects us, to some extent, to figure things out on our own. He has, according to Hips, “the worst luck I seen in 15 years,” and he’s currently down $44,000. Does this give him pause? Prompt him to reflect on his life and the choices he’s making? No. On his way home from a gambling den, he stops and tries to hustle up $20 on a street basketball bet. (Unsurprisingly, he loses.)
But that’s how addicted he is to the dopamine hit of winning – or losing. This is not a guy who needs to hustle for bread; he comes from a well-to-do Upper West Side family, and has a solid gig as an English professor at City College. (When Rupert Wyatt remade the movie in 2014 with Mark Wahlberg in the lead, some chortled that he wasn’t credible as a professor, but to be fair, Caan isn’t exactly the academic type either.) But that job, like his familial relationships and his romance with shiksa knockout Billie (Lauren Hutton), is secondary. His only real interest is gambling, and his only other activity, as he tells her, is “going hunting.”
“Hunting what?” she asks.
“Cash,” he replies.
That hunt takes him to his mother (Jacqueline Brookes), and they play out a script they’ve presumably gone through more than once; “I probably won’t even need it,” he lies to her, and one thing The Gambler knows, and knows well, is the language of liars. It also knows the language of addiction, the single-mindedness that becomes so prevalent in a person, you can see it in their eyes, darting away to think about a fix, even in the middle of conversations that will enable that very activity. It’s not surprising to learn that Caan was himself in the thrall of a cocaine addiction while crafting this, one of his finest performances; he’s more exciting in The Godfather, perhaps, or more melancholy in Thief, but I’m not sure he’s ever been more present in a movie, more urgently thinking and plotting and alive onscreen.
Reisz, a Czech-born filmmaker who burst out of the British kitchen sink movement (his debut film was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), was making his American debut, and his sense of time and place – New York in the mid-‘70s – has a similar, razor-sharp attentiveness to detail to other “tourist” portraits of the city, like Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and Passer’s Born to Win. And he fills out his scenes with a steady stream of ace character actors, including not only the terrific Sorvino but Burt Young and Vic Tayback (both far scarier than their later, teddy bear images might lead you to believe) and very early appearances by James Woods and M. Emmet Walsh (with dark, but still thinning, hair).
But this is ultimately a character study, and an uncommonly intimate one. The script is by notorious scumbag James Toback (and as with most of his work, its issues with gender and race are a lot to unpack) – like Axel, a well-off Jewish kid with a teaching gig and a gambling addiction. That kind of inside perspective can’t be faked, any more than it can be explained; when his mother hears the amount he owes and asks, not unreasonably, “How is that possible,” he answers accurately and simply: “Well, I gambled and I lost.” It’s not a choice he makes. It’s a fact of his life.
And that’s the harrowing thing about the great gambling movies, about this and California Split and Owning Mahowney and Mississippi Grind: you know, with absolute certainty, that their protagonists are going to keep risking it, in spite of everything they’ve been through, in spite of their proximity to injury or even death, in spite of how easy it would be for any of the rest of us to just pay off the debt and walk away. And they’re going to keep risking it because when that risk pays off, yes, it is thrilling. You get it. You get how and why they chase that high.
“How do you feel?” Hips asks near the film’s conclusion, when things have finally evened up for Axel. And in response, he’s stone-faced. He doesn’t feel much of anything. It’s The Gambler’s variation on the ending of California Split – it’s not the winning that makes him feel alive. It’s the losing, and in that, the danger, the desperate scrounge trying to scrape things together. He escapes death at that moment, and so, he goes looking for it somewhere else.
The picture’s producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, would find their own jackpot two years later with Rocky – another kind of ‘70s character drama, and one that would prove instructive in the kind of movies that were going to make money from here on out. The two films’ endings couldn’t be more divergent; for that matter, neither could this one and the aforementioned 2014 remake. By that time, the kind of bummer conclusion the original Gambler was willing to subject an audience to was not only implausible, but impossible. The remake imports the end of Rounders, rather than grapple with what Toback and Reisz and Caan wanted to leave us with: a closing image of casual danger and, in that, chilling depravity. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 0 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:131-0715776-4713935:VEZPJNZAYRWQJ4209W74$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DVEZPJNZAYRWQJ4209W74:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjIzODE3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUwNzYwMzE@._V1_QL75_UX190_CR0,8,190,281_.jpg",
"https://m.media-amazon.... | [] | [] | [
"Reviews",
"Showtimes",
"DVDs",
"Photos",
"User Ratings",
"Synopsis",
"Trailers",
"Credits"
] | null | [] | 2015-01-15T00:00:00 | The Gambler: Directed by Rupert Wyatt. With Mark Wahlberg, George Kennedy, Griffin Cleveland, Jessica Lange. Literature professor and gambler Jim Bennett's debt causes him to borrow money from his mother and a loan shark. Further complicating his situation, is his relationship with one of his students. Will Bennett risk his life for a second chance? | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | Jim Bennett: I've been up two and a half million dollars.
Frank: What you got on you?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: What you put away?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on any social level. Did your grandfather take risks?
Jim Bennett: Yes. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 28 | https://www.sevendaysvt.com/LiveCulture/archives/2014/12/06/what-im-watching-the-gambler | en | What I'm Watching: The Gambler | [
"https://www.sevendaysvt.com/images/icons/user_generic.gif",
"https://media1.sevendaysvt.com/sevendaysvt/imager/u/review/41619232/community1-01-10f7dd57e169adbc.jpg",
"https://media1.sevendaysvt.com/sevendaysvt/imager/u/review/41605132/burlington1-01-cea8e23cc907e446.jpg",
"https://media2.sevendaysvt.com/seve... | [] | [] | [
"film",
"movie",
"what i'm watching",
"the gambler",
"new hollywood",
"new american cinema",
"karel reisz",
"james caan",
"art cinema",
"hollywood",
"mark wahlberg",
"What I'm Watching"
] | null | [
"Ethan de Seife"
] | 2014-12-06T00:00:00 | In researching the film I just watched a few days ago — Karel Reisz's 1974 picture The Gambler — I learned that it's recently been... | en | /favicon.ico | Seven Days | https://www.sevendaysvt.com/LiveCulture/archives/2014/12/06/what-im-watching-the-gambler | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 86 | https://kids-in-mind.com/g/gambler.htm | en | The Gambler [2014] [R] - 6.4.10 | [
"https://kids-in-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/kidsinmind-logo.png",
"https://www.criticsinc.com/photos/ratings/6-4-10.png",
"https://kids-in-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/divider-smaller.png",
"https://www.criticsinc.com/photos/movieposters/g/gambler.jpg",
"https://kids-in-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2018-01-26T13:03:44-05:00 | An associate literature professor and obsessive gambler (Mark Wahlberg) tries to borrow money from his mother (Jessica Lange), and then from a loan shark to pay off another debt, when he begins to realize that his life is going nowhere. Also with Brie Larson, Sonya Walger, John Goodman, Cassandra Starr and Michael Kenneth Williams. Directed by Rupert Wyatt. [1:51] | en | /apple-touch-icon.png | Kids-In-Mind.com | https://kids-in-mind.com/g/gambler.htm | SEX/NUDITY 6 - We see topless dancers in a club wearing thong underwear and gyrating around poles as men watch (bare breasts, abdomens, legs to the hip, buttocks and backs are seen in the distance and close-up); one dancer talks to a man and seems to be trying to convince him of something and he pulls away from her.
► A man is shown sitting in a bathtub and his chest and upper abdomen are visible; the man's mother enters the room and he becomes upset. A bare-chested man zips up his pants and we see his chest, abdomen and back. A woman's dress is shown slit up the side to reveal her bare thighs. A woman wears a low-cut top that reveals cleavage. A man is shown in a sauna with a towel wrapped around his waist and his bare shoulders, chest, large abdomen and back are visible. A woman wears a robe that hangs open to reveal her bare upper chest. Cheerleaders where skimpy outfits that reveal cleavage, bare abdomens and legs during a basketball game.
► A younger woman and student of a professor kisses him and pushes him back onto a sofa in a hotel room (sex is implied).
► A younger woman and student of a professor pulls up in a car and says to the man, "If I have to pull you into an inappropriate relationship to get you out of your job" and the man gets in the car with her. A younger woman and student of a professor insinuates that she wants to go to dinner with the man and he declines saying that it would be inappropriate.
VIOLENCE/GORE 4 - A man is shown handcuffed and tied to a chair as another man hits him on the side of the head (the man in the chair falls over and moans while lying on the ground and we see that he has a bloody face and lip). A man walks into an alley where another man grabs him and shoves him against a wall and threatens him. A man throws another man into a bathtub. A man is shoved into a car and handcuffed. A woman slaps her adult son in the face and berates him. A woman grabs her adult son's arm and yells at him outside a bank and passersby seem concerned.
► A man is shown with oxygen tubes while lying in a hospital bed and we understand that he is dying. A man is shown losing large sums of money at roulette tables and black jack tables in several scenes.
► A man talks about a time when he "fell down and [scatological term deleted] myself." A man yells at a student for texting while in his class. A man yells at another man who doesn't give him a good price for something he is trying to sell. A man suggests to another man that he "stake" him and explains the "interest" and penalties on the loan. A woman refuses to loan her adult son money. A man approaches a college basketball player and tries to convince him to limit the number of points he scores during an upcoming game. A man says, "I'm gonna kill that pretty little blonde girl." A man makes a threatening remark about sending another man a part of another person's anatomy. A man in a hospital bed says, "I'm gonna die." A man says, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god." A man tells a younger woman to leave and she does. A man says, "Victory or death."
► A man dreams about torrents of water rushes down a hillside and washing the stilts out from under his house. A man takes a gun out of his freezer. A man shaves his head and we hear the razor scratching on his scalp.
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
FILTER by RATINGS
Did you know you can now filter searches by any combination of ratings? Just go to our search page or use the search bar, with or without a keyword, from the top navigation menu. Move sliders from 0-10 in any combination, check and uncheck MPAA ratings and use keywords to further filter results -- please let us know what you think.
THE ASSIGNED NUMBERS
Unlike the MPAA we do not assign one inscrutable rating based on age but 3 objective ratings for SEX/NUDITY, VIOLENCE/GORE & LANGUAGE on a scale of 0 to 10, from lowest to highest depending on quantity & context |more| | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 5 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:147-9790094-7113459:E0N831K7V4G2ZGXXYKED$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DE0N831K7V4G2ZGXXYKED:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjIzODE3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUwNzYwMzE@._V1_QL75_UX190_CR0,8,190,281_.jpg",
"https://m.media-amazon.... | [] | [] | [
"Reviews",
"Showtimes",
"DVDs",
"Photos",
"User Ratings",
"Synopsis",
"Trailers",
"Credits"
] | null | [] | 2015-01-15T00:00:00 | The Gambler: Directed by Rupert Wyatt. With Mark Wahlberg, George Kennedy, Griffin Cleveland, Jessica Lange. Literature professor and gambler Jim Bennett's debt causes him to borrow money from his mother and a loan shark. Further complicating his situation, is his relationship with one of his students. Will Bennett risk his life for a second chance? | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | Jim Bennett: I've been up two and a half million dollars.
Frank: What you got on you?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: What you put away?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on any social level. Did your grandfather take risks?
Jim Bennett: Yes. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 45 | https://www.phoenixfilmfestival.com/blog/2014/12/the-gambler-movie-review-by-eric-forthun | en | Movie Review by Eric Forthun — Phoenix Film Festival | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56047552e4b00047c4e83900/t/5b3e614888251b15381b1010/1530814794354/phoenix-film-festival+graphic.jpg?format=1500w | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56047552e4b00047c4e83900/t/5b3e614888251b15381b1010/1530814794354/phoenix-film-festival+graphic.jpg?format=1500w | [
"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56047552e4b00047c4e83900/1485910681119-7JEJ0FBCHP2FDAS2V65O/pff+lOGO.png?format=1500w",
"http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56047552e4b00047c4e83900/56098607e4b0c497c2bbae18/560987b1e4b0c497c2bc066d/1443465137193/Gambler.jpg?format=original",
"https://images.squ... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"phxcritics"
] | 2014-12-28T09:18:45-07:00 | The Gambler
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Michael Kenneth Williams, and George Kennedy
Directed by Rupert Wyatt
Rated R
Run Time: 111 minutes
Genre: Crime Drama
Opens December 25th
By Eric Forthun | en | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56047552e4b00047c4e83900/1444009843141-70EUE3PY6U665RZK5XOC/favicon.ico?format=100w | Phoenix Film Festival | https://www.phoenixfilmfestival.com/blog/2014/12/the-gambler-movie-review-by-eric-forthun | The Gambler
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Michael Kenneth Williams, and George Kennedy
Directed by Rupert Wyatt
Rated R
Run Time: 111 minutes
Genre: Crime Drama
Opens December 25th
By Eric Forthun of Cinematic Shadows
The Gambler crafts a largely unsympathetic protagonist that doesn't earn the audience's interest or respect. Rather, he's a self-destructive, compulsive, and staunchly stubborn man that comes off as arrogant and selfish. There's very little humanity within Mark Wahlberg's portrayal of Jim Bennett, a literature professor at a local university who gambles high stakes on the side. The film opens with his father on his death bed, telling Jim that he won't be giving his son any of the inheritance that he would have presumably received, leaving Jim cold and penniless. His gambling debts rise and his mother disapproves, having raised Jim in a wealthy home and wanting the best for her son. But he is never satisfied with teaching and making a sizable income; instead, he wants to gamble away all of his money on games largely based on luck rather than skill. It makes for an oddly bland, lifeless, and shallow film, a departure for director Rupert Wyatt and writer William Monahan.
Jim's in debt with many people, but his primary debt lies with Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams), a loan shark that revels in Jim's addiction. He lends Jim money one night in order to pay back another man, but Jim's plan backfires when he gambles away the money that he owes both; after winning big, Jim decides to go all in on the money that would pay off his debts. He loses everything. This is one of many moments where Jim's decision to self-destruct overpowers his instinct to survive. The film jumps between that gambling life, the one that runs from late at night until the wee hours of the morning, and his professional life, where he teaches hundreds of English students about classic writings. His best student is Amy Phillips (Brie Larson), a girl that he also sees in his free time. Their relationship is complicated and thinly defined; why, exactly, she continues to admire him after seeing his true self is beyond me.
The film lacks urgency and ultimately purpose with its central character. When a supporting character played by John Goodman becomes, far and away, the best character in the film, something's wrong with the narrative. Particularly as he only occupies about twenty minutes of screen time, William Monahan's script feels thinly conceived and narratively flat. There are monotonous, unexciting gambling scenes that hinge on us caring about his habits and winnings, but when we realize he'll just keep doing it until he dies, it loses meaning. There isn't much consequence when suspense is built around a card being flipped over. Should this character receive redemption? I'm not sure it really matters in the grand scheme of things, but director Rupert Wyatt doesn't lend a helpful hand to making that question worthwhile. As a remake of the film from 1971, there doesn't seem to be a proper updating to make the film feel necessary or relevant. Wyatt's previous effort, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, was more socially conscious and cognizant of its circumstances. The Gambler feels overly clichéd, repetitive, and dull, becoming one of the major disappointments of the holiday season. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 10 | https://paramount-pics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler_(2014_film) | en | The Gambler (2014 film) | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180123000816 | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180123000816 | [
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/e/e6/Site-logo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713171552",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/c/ca/The_Gambler_poster.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/220?cb=20180123000816",
"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ff185fe4-8356-4b6b-ad48-621b95... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Paramount Pictures Wiki"
] | null | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title character, premiered on November 10, 2014 at the AFI Fest, and was... | en | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/paramount/images/4/4a/Site-favicon.ico/revision/latest?cb=20210911190742 | Paramount Pictures Wiki | https://paramount-pics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gambler_(2014_film) | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title character, premiered on November 10, 2014 at the AFI Fest, and was theatrically released in the United States on December 25, 2014. It features George Kennedy's final film role before his death in 2016. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 12 | https://bennbell.com/2017/07/05/the-gambler-2014/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://bennbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/gambler-2014.jpg?w=676",
"https://bennbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/john-goodman-as-frank.jpg?w=676",
"https://bennbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/gambler-1974.jpg?w=470&h=869",
"https://bennbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/is.jpg?w=506&h=632",
"... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Benn Bell"
] | 2017-07-05T00:00:00 | Movie Review The Gambler (2014) is a remake of the classic 1974 film of the same name. That film, directed by Karel Reisz, was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella, The Gambler. It is interesting how life imitates art and how art imitates life. The 1974 version was written by James Toback, who had a… | en | Ghost Dog | https://bennbell.com/2017/07/05/the-gambler-2014/ | Movie Review
The Gambler (2014) is a remake of the classic 1974 film of the same name. That film, directed by Karel Reisz, was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella, The Gambler. It is interesting how life imitates art and how art imitates life. The 1974 version was written by James Toback, who had a gambling addiction at the time, came from a wealthy family, and taught creative writing at New York City College. It was his first screenplay and he based it on his own true life experiences with more than just a nod to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling as well and wrote the novella, based on his own experiences, in 26 days to pay off a gambling debt.
The 2014 version stars Mark Wahlberg as the college professor who teaches literature by day and gambles by night. Wahlberg gives a creditable performance as the gambling addicted professor Jim Bennett. Jim gets in trouble with not one but three different mob figures as he courts danger by getting deeper in debt with each one and staying only one step ahead of complete annihilation. At one point he is $240,000 in debt. One of these mob figures is Frank, played to near perfection by John Goodman, who takes a fatherly interest in Jim and drops philosophical axioms on him in every scene they play together. Still, you wouldn’t want to cross him or any of the others.
Jessica Lange plays the wealthy mother who bails him out one last time. Her performance is out sized, over the top, and a total delight to watch. We see where Jim may have gotten some of his issues. Brie Larson plays the girl. She is gorgeous to look at but doesn’t have much to do.
The 2014 film is directed by Rupert Wyatt who brought you Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). The screenplay was written by William Monahan whose previous efforts include The Departed which was known for its crackling dialogue and starred once again, Mark Wahlberg. Not quite as successful here, but not bad. As already mentioned, this movie is a remake of the 1974 movie written by James Toback and starring James Caan.
The locations are different and the cinematic style is very different. The 2014 version takes place in the Los Angeles underworld and filmed in a very slick fashion in colors of cold dark blues and reds. The 1974 version was much grittier and took place in New York City.
It is axiomatic to say that every film made in the 1970’s is better than any film made in the decades that followed. That is certainly true in this case. In my view the 1974 version was much better. James Caan sizzled as the main character, Axel, who strutted around with his shirt half unbuttoned and his hairy chest exposed as cocky as a bantam rooster, or more to the point like an actual erect cock throbbing with energy and enthusiasm. He exudes sexuality and cockiness. Lauren Hutton plays the girl and Paul Sorvino plays the mob guy, Hips.
Axel is into self-destruction and self-loathing.
“What do all gamblers have in common?”
“They’re in it to lose.”
I liked the ending in the 1974 version better as well. In the 2014 version, after Jim just barley pulls out a win at the last minute and squares all deals and saves his ass, he is seen running to meet up with Amy. This is a hopeful ending that, let’s face it, doesn’t make much sense. It is more of a Hollywood ending one might say. In the 1974 version, after Axel pulls off a last minute win and saves himself from certain disaster, we see him heading down into a dangerous section of New York.
“Don’t go down there Axel,” Hips warns, “they’re cannibals down there (which I guess is code for black people). They will eat you alive!”
Axel, following what must be a death wish, goes into a black whorehouse and picks up a girl and takes her to her room. He is followed by her pimp. Axel then tries to rip her off by not paying her. The whore screams for her pimp who crashes into the room brandishing a knife. A fight ensues and it looks like Axel is winning. He knocks the knife out of the pimp’s hand, the black whore picks up the knife and slashes Alex across the cheek with it. Alex flees the room clutching a rag to his bleeding face.
As he is leaving the flop house he catches a look at himself in a mirror and sees the bloody slash on his face that will no doubt be like a Heidelberg scar that he will carry around with him like a red badge of courage for the rest of his life. Roll credits.
In the novella, at the end, the protagonist, Alexey, is down and out having lost most of his money on roulette. He meets an old friend who gives him news of his love interest, Polina. This gives Alexey hope as he learns from his friend that Polina is in Switzerland and that she does love him after all. But alas, it is a false hope because in the final analysis, Alexey is still a gambler at heart and cannot escape his fate.
What all three characters have in common is a gambling addiction. In a letter to a friend Dostoevsky says the thing about his gambler, “… is that all his vitality, his strength, his impetus, his courage, have gone into roulette.” Gambling is not just an addiction, but an overwhelming compulsion that seizes its victims by the mind, body and spirit.
This magnificent obsession is on fine display in both movies and the novella. For my money the 1974 version of the Gambler is the best. Do I get any bets? | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 7 | https://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/film-review-the-gambler-1201353148/ | en | Film Review: ‘The Gambler’ | [
"https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035310&c4=&cv=3.9&cj=1",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety-2020/assets/build/svg/brand-logo.svg",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/the-gambler-mark-wahlberg.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Justin Chang"
] | 2014-11-11T08:00:44+00:00 | There’s enough macho swagger for three pictures but barely enough soul to sustain even one in Rupert Wyatt’s gambling drama. | en | Variety | https://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/film-review-the-gambler-1201353148/ | There’s enough swaggering cynicism for three pictures but barely enough soul to sustain even one in Rupert Wyatt’s “The Gambler,” a stylish, energetic but disappointingly glib remake of Karel Reisz’s still-potent 1974 drama of the same title. Mark Wahlberg tears into one of his meatiest roles as an English professor drowning in a sea of blackjack debts and self-destructive impulses, a born risk-taker who’s aptly described as everything from “the kind of guy that likes to lose” to “the world’s stupidest asshole.” But it’s that surfeit of macho attitude in William Monahan’s script that keeps Wahlberg from coming anywhere near James Caan’s sly brilliance in the earlier film, making this a movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core. In a roll of the awards-season dice, Paramount is launching “The Gambler” Dec. 19 with a one-week Oscar-qualifying run before its Jan. 2 wide release, when the collective draw of Wahlberg and a juicy supporting cast should yield solid if not hefty B.O. payouts.
Released just a month after “California Split,” Robert Altman’s more idiosyncratic take on the pleasures and perils of going all in, Reisz’s original “Gambler” marked the heavily autobiographical screenwriting debut of James Toback, who initially objected when Paramount announced plans for a remake without his knowledge. (The scribe has since given the project his blessing and received an exec producer credit, while original producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff retain those credits here.) In its broad narrative outlines if not its jazzier sense of style, the remake remains largely faithful to Toback’s self-probing study of a Harvard-educated New York academic who finds himself increasingly at the mercy of his gambling addiction, alienating his nearest and dearest while seeking to evade and outwit all the bookies and collectors on his tail.
Popular on Variety
In this Los Angeles-set retelling, Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, a cynical motormouth who spends most of his evenings at the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of a Korean-run establishment, where he’s racked up enough debt that the casino’s tolerant owner, Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing), can no longer turn a blind eye. Learning that he has one week to pay back $240,000 or face grievous consequences, Bennett makes his situation immediately worse by accepting $50,000 from a beret-wearing loan shark named Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams), establishing a pattern of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and squandering every bailout that comes his way. On more than one occasion, Bennett approaches big-time lender Frank (a superb, bald-pated John Goodman), who warns him not to make the mistake of appropriating his services, lest he find himself forced to pay the ultimate price.
Bennett’s compulsion springs at least partly from his privileged upbringing, and he reacts with more contempt than gratitude when his acerbic mother, Roberta (Jessica Lange), coughs up the requisite quarter-million in cash, though she warns him that it’s the last time she’ll come to his rescue. But a solution that easy would scarcely satisfy the story’s dramatic requirements, much less Bennett himself, who seems hooked on more than just the possibility of winning big. What excites him is the far more dangerous thrill of pushing himself to the limits and potentially losing everything, so that he can rely on his wits and sheer dumb luck to pull himself back from the brink. When a concerned croupier balks at dealing him another hand, telling him it’s for his own good, Bennett fires back: “You don’t come here for the fucking protection.”
By day, Bennett (sort of) teaches a college class on the modern novel, which mainly consists of bashing the know-nothings and burnouts who call themselves his students, using Shakespeare and Camus to pound home the idea that only a few lucky geniuses are able to rise above mediocrity in their chosen field. One such exception is Amy Phillips (Brie Larson), a quietly brilliant literature student and part-time casino employee who knows about her professor’s double life (shades of “Half Nelson”), which naturally leads them to the next level of inappropriate intimacy. But Amy isn’t the only pupil who will figure into Bennett’s escape plan: The others are Dexter (Emory Cohen), a state tennis champ, and Lamar (Anthony Kelley), a GPA-challenged basketball star who might be just what Bennett needs to dig himself out of his latest hole.
Virtually without exception, the dialogue in “The Gambler” is pitched at a level of caustic, hyper-articulate, testosterone-fueled bluster that swiftly announces itself as Monahan’s handiwork. In that respect, the script proves a sturdy fit for Wahlberg, who may be no viewer’s idea of a professorial type, but who knows how to toss off Monahan’s profane zingers with aplomb, as he did in his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Departed.” Here, playing a guy so bored with his coddled, complacent existence that he can only feel alive by risking everything, Wahlberg proves no less ferociously eloquent — too eloquent, frankly, to the point where you wish that Bennett would spend less time sounding off about what an empty shell he’s become, and more time simply being.
There are a few attempts to underline the notion that this guy is sinking in own excesses, particularly in the surreal use of water imagery; in one dreamlike interlude, a bathtub (a nod to a scene in the 1974 film) briefly opens a window into his childlike soul. But in the end, “The Gambler” doesn’t seem especially interested in exploring these tortured depths. Even as a clock counts down the days to his deadline (a device that generates little in the way of suspense), Bennett doesn’t really deepen in complexity or pathos; he just gets snarkier and more self-satisfied. Given his near-total disregard for his own safety, it almost feels like a waste of energy for a viewer to root for him to survive, or to take much pleasure in the film’s softly redemptive ending; by the time Bennett finally takes a well-deserved punch from one of Mr. Lee’s thugs, you may feel less inclined to flinch than to cheer.
Neither of the two actresses is well served by the script’s awfully stunted view of women, though Lange succeeds in upping the emotional ante in her few scenes as the embittered mother, reacting to her son’s dilemma with equal parts scorn and horror. Larson, so good in last year’s “Short Term 12,” is a wonderfully poised presence here, but it’s one of the film’s more glaring failures that it gives us no real sense of Amy’s intellectual potential; the moment she falls into bed with Bennett is the moment she ceases to be a figure of interest. Williams, Ing and especially Goodman deliver uniquely pungent variations on the role of the reluctant enforcer, waxing philosophical about their methods and never resorting to physical violence unless absolutely necessary, while Richard Schiff has an amusing scene as a pawnbroker whom our hero approaches in his hour of need.
Wyatt, the accomplished helmer behind 2011’s terrific “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and the under-appreciated 2008 prison drama “The Escapist,” keeps the energy percolating at a high level throughout — mainly through a stream of arresting and unpredictable musical choices that include Chopin, Cole Porter and Bob Dylan, encompassing everything from Dinah Washington’s soulful “This Bitter Earth” to Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ haunting a cappella cover of “Creep.” (Wyatt shares the music-supervisor credits with Theo Green and Clint Bennett.) Pete Beaudreau’s editing is sharpest in the casino, where the rapid-fire blackjack games naturally heighten one’s attention; a time-lapse gambling sequence and a few tilt-shift effects further distinguish d.p. Greig Fraser’s often dark and moody visuals, which make atmospheric use of recognizable L.A. landmarks (including USC and Downtown) as well as other California locations. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 53 | https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-gambler-trailer-director-rupert-wyatt-mark-wahlberg-remake/ | en | » ‘The Gambler’ Director Rupert Wyatt on How to Pull Off a Remake (Plus: the Premiere of the Movie’s Trailer) | [
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/espn-grantland/img/grantland-logo@2x.png ",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/espn-grantland/img/hollywood-prospectus-header.png",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-gambler-e1415134019112.jpg?w=2048",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/uploads... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Matt Patches"
] | 2014-11-05T14:00:59-05:00 | en | https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-gambler-trailer-director-rupert-wyatt-mark-wahlberg-remake/ | After the critical and financial success of 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt had options. He began developing projects as a writer-director, material near and dear to his heart. He was not looking to direct someone else’s work. And then a remake of Karel Reisz’s 1974 drama The Gambler, penned by The Departed screenwriter William Monahan, hit his desk.
“When you read something, if you see potential in it but you want to change it, it’s hard, sometimes, to make those changes,” Wyatt says of his resistance. “I thought to myself, Well, if I read a script that actually just works exactly as written on the page, that’s something I’m going to be intrigued by. And that’s exactly the case with Bill’s script: It came fully formed and fully realized, so I could visualize it very quickly.”
Wyatt’s The Gambler bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor, whole moments seemingly lifted from James Toback’s original script. But put side by side, the remake and the ’74 film resemble a double helix, intertwined and antithetical. Grantland is excited to share the premiere of the trailer for The Gambler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn5a9wL5cQA
We spoke to Wyatt about his film — one of the year’s few character-driven studio features — and its relationship with the original.
Was there a particular image or beat in William Monahan’s script that grabbed you, where remaking this film made total sense?
It was really the fact that he painted an L.A. that is not of people’s preconceptions. The characters within that have this extraordinary color and vibrancy. For me, one of Bill’s greatest strengths is his ability just to give voice to characters — write extraordinary dialogue. He writes in a very kind of Shakespearean, elevated style that really jumps off the page. Reading it was such a pleasure, but I could totally see characters communicating within these situations. I knew going in we were going to be able to do something different within the studio system, a really great, character-driven, freewheeling narrative all built around this one extraordinary, nihilistic character of Jim Bennett.
Are you surprised there’s still room in studio slates for films like The Gambler? How does it push through?
In this day and age, with the ever-expanding tentpole season, there are many great, character-driven, mainstream films being made and they are being made less and less by the big five studios. And I think it’s a rare opportunity, as a filmmaker, to have the chance to not only work on something that isn’t necessarily having to sell itself on the basis of one set piece and visual extravaganza after another. It’s getting the opportunity to really explore character and explore detail and nuance. The more internalized aspects of storytelling. I think that’s becoming more and more the domain of great cable television, not Hollywood. With The Gambler, I could see the chance to do it on the big screen — which, for me, is still the Holy Grail, and will always be the Holy Grail. People such as Mark [Wahlberg] get these films green-lit. That’s the reality. Mark signing on to do this and wanting to do this is a testament to him as an actor. He’s taking risks all the time. You can see that in his career: He’s an actor that will bounce between genres. Very mainstream pictures, and then utilize the cachet he’s built up over these years to then do really challenging, interesting roles. He’s not a guy who rests on his laurels, by any stretch, so for me to be along for the ride was a privilege.
How would you contrast James Caan’s Axel Freed from the 1974 version to Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett?
Bill very much reinterpreted the notion of the title — not even necessarily the narrative, but the title of what “The Gambler” represents. James Caan’s character was a man who was very much based on James Toback, the original writer. He was a man who was seeking the eternal high of this synthetic experience of gambling — the tables, the casinos, the bookies. In doing so, he was finding his life increasingly spinning out of control. He was not able to live in the real world; he was constantly seeking the escapism of the gambling world. That is obviously a true representation of a degenerate gambler, and his life was being destroyed by it.
What really appealed to me was ripping all of that up and coming at it from a very different perspective. [Monahan] was looking to do something totally different. He was setting out this agenda that this is not about a man whose life is out of control; this is a man who’s in a prison. He exists within a gilded cage. He has all of these opportunities, he has looks, he has wealth, he has education — all of these things that have trapped him into becoming somebody he really doesn’t believe in. It’s made him miserable, and so he therefore sets out, over the course of these days, to deconstruct himself, to blow it all up and start again. That is essentially the story of an overdog wanting to become an underdog. It’s a very anti-materialistic point of view. It’s basically saying, for a man or a woman to be who they truly need to be, wealth is not necessarily material. It can and should be spiritual. For a mainstream movie to be setting out those arguments is, I think, a fascinating aspect.
It sounds almost uplifting.
Yeah. It’s “uplifting” in the sense that it’s not Rocky — it’s not a guy who’s attempting to achieve greatness in some kind of “win” situation. He actually wants to get back to zero so he can truly start again. That is neither Rocky nor Leaving Las Vegas — it’s a guy who wants to set off on a great spiritual journey.
The original version feels tethered to 1974. Do you think your Gambler is time sensitive?
I think so. I think we are increasingly on this treadmill of our obligations in life or those goals set out for us in life — especially in Western society — where we’re always looking to acquire things, to own things, to be promoted, to reach the top of our professions, to do things that can sometimes blind us to who we really should be and what we should really be striving for. That’s an increasing phenomenon of modern society, the haves and have-nots. For a man to buck the system in this very nihilistic, brutally honest way and stick two fingers up at that and say, “All right, I’m going to get rid of it all, and I’m going to gamble on the things that really matter — on life — and risk my own life in doing so, to get back to a clean slate.” That’s really unique among many scripts I’ve read.
As a New Yorker, I’m not at all outraged that you transplanted your Gambler to Los Angeles, but I want to be.
The way Toback and [director] Karel Reisz’s character has an East Coast sensibility — the moneylenders and that criminal underworld — this deals with a much more progressive, material Los Angeles of 2014, and with a more Korean underworld of gambling, which is very much endemic of certain hidden parts of Los Angeles, which we’re very grateful to explore. Because they’re not the palm tree aspects of West Hollywood.
How much time did you spend gambling in the Korean underworld?
I talked to a couple of vice cops who gave me really good insight into the gambling underworld. The Korean gambling underworld is so closed off to Caucasians that it’s impossible to get in, so there was no real way of doing firsthand research, but I could sort of take inspiration from secondhand stories and Internet cafés that exist on the surface. You go in a trap door and you’re in a whole other world of gambling, and it’s only five, six miles away from where I am now.
In the trailer, we see Wahlberg show 13, then hit an 8. In the original, he shows 18 and hits a three. Easter egg?
That’s right. Yeah, that is one of the few scenes that closely resembles the original.
We also see Wahlberg’s character escort his mother to the bank to withdraw money. That’s a scene from the original — she withdraws cash so he can keep gambling and pay off his debts. What’s happening in your film?
He needs money from his mom, but he needs money from his mom in order to basically destroy his relationship with his mom. In the original film, it was a tragedy, because he was essentially taking money from his own family. In this Gambler, he is as far apart from his mother’s philosophy on life as he could possibly get. She’s somebody whose backstory — Jessica Lange and I sort of worked through this — was of a waitress in Reno, and was looking to basically reach the pinnacle of getting out of her situation, getting any sort of handhold on a material possession she could. So she’s probably been through numerous husbands and finally married the man that, ultimately, was Jim’s father, and basically worked her way into this place of great wealth and ownership, but ended up becoming trapped by it. But she doesn’t see it that way. She’s living, now, alone as a widow in this huge estate, and she has no understanding of why her son is not happy with his life — he seemingly has everything. So they have a completely dysfunctional relationship.
Brie Larson plays Wahlberg’s student and love interest in the film. It’s a loaded dynamic on top of a substantial age difference. How does that “taboo” relationship complicate his quest?
Well, in a way, they’re soul mates, and that’s what he sees in her. It’s not a short-term kind of physical fling. It’s why I really set out, from the get-go, to cast Brie, and we were thrilled when she signed on. She’s very young — 23 or 24 — yet she has this amazing, old-soul quality to her. She’s someone who’s been working, musically and actingwise, for at least 10 years already. So she seemed a perfect match for Mark, and, in a way, even though she does so much of this as a character, it made Jim better and all the more likable. He’s not the most likable character on paper; he says a lot of unlikable things and sort of tells people how it is, instead of how they’d like it to be. That sort of gets him into a lot of trouble, but you like him more for the fact that he falls for a girl like Brie’s character, Amy. She’s very much a free spirit, which is something that he really wants to be, so that’s why he’s attracted to her.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Escapist relied primarily on original scores. Is that the case here?
It’s going to totally change that, as far as the films I’ve done before. It was an amazing opportunity for me, and I’m thrilled Paramount got behind it. I wanted to use a lot of source music that would, in a way, chapter the film, because Mark’s character is a novelist. So I wanted to chapter the film with these music-driven sequences that take us through the story; bearing in mind his whole philosophy on life is this “genius or zero.” I saw him as looking for great artists — classic artists, a very eclectic mix of music. But each, in turn, are true individual, timeless songs. There’s a great new band that we found, called St. Paul & the Broken Bones, that has opening-credit music. For me, I was able to create my best soundtrack ever with this movie.
Is the film broken into literal chapters?
Yeah. It’s set over seven days, and the days are titles.
The Gambler ’74 isn’t a funny movie. But when you revise it with actors like Wahlberg and John Goodman, maybe it could be?
Totally, yeah. Their timings are extraordinary … I think, with this, it would be hard for me to claim, but I would like to aspire to sort of the Hal Ashby tone. Something like Shampoo, with regard to The Gambler. It has a very freewheeling sensibility about it, which is very influenced by his work. He’s one of those very few filmmakers who manage to ride that edge of pathos and humor at the same time — have you believe in those characters, yet, at the same time, create a very mythical world. You see it in The Last Detail, Shampoo, and Harold and Maude. There’s a kind of love of life in there, and that’s what I want it to be in The Gambler.
How important are rehearsals to crafting a character piece like this?
I rehearsed with Mark for weeks prior. He knew this script inside out, and, as an actor, I think anyone coming to this script and character really needed to do that, and he did it on an amazing level. He has seven-, eight-page monologues in this film, so the fact that he was able to step onto set and just know his characters so inside out, so verbatim. I think his background as a singer was useful for that. Bill writes in this very rat-a-tat, fast delivery. It’s a tough thing for an actor to be able to deliver the intonation and vernacular of the way he writes. Mark, as an ex-rapper, has this amazing ability to unleash it in a very articulate, but very fast, rat-a-tat sort of fashion.
You came out of Apes with great reviews and a box office success. In turn, your name came up for a number of other blockbusters. Were you driven to do something smaller after that? Is a movie like this a breeze after handling motion-captured monkeys?
I then, and still do, have great ambitions to make films on a large scale, [but] there’s something very freeing about working on a smaller budget. Still within the studio system, where someone has the privilege of working with the greatest crews and actors in the world. So they’re both incredibly appealing. I understand things very, very well and get inspired when I understand story — when I can find something that, narratively, is driven by that. So I was never seeking out The Gambler, but it just so happens that I came across it, read it, and immediately saw it. What happens next? I hope to do a totally different genre and totally different scale of movie.
Do you have a gambling game of choice?
[Laughs.] Life, I would say. | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 6 | https://www.scriptslug.com/script/the-gambler-2014 | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/img/imager/posters/4209/the-gambler-2014_f5e9c84dee.jpg",
"https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/img/imager/posters/3065/the-american-2010_f5e9c84dee.jpg",
"https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/img/imager/posters/3094/collateral-2004_f5e9c84dee.jpg",
"https://assets.scriptslug.c... | [] | [] | [
"scripts",
"screenplays",
"film scripts",
"tv scripts",
"series script",
"movies",
"television",
"pdf",
"download",
"teleplay",
"movie scripts",
"screenplay",
"film",
"tv",
"entertainment",
"education",
"fade in",
"final draft"
] | null | [
"{ '@type': 'Person', 'name': William Monahan } { '@type': 'Person', 'name': James Toback }"
] | 2017-12-29T00:00:00 | Written by William Monahanand James Toback.Literature professor Jim Bennett leads a secret life as a high-stakes gambler. Always a risk-taker, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Staying one step ahead, he pits his creditor against the operator of an illicit gambling ring while garnering the attention of Frank, a paternalistic loan shark. As his relationship with a student deepens, Bennett must risk everything for a second chance. | en | /apple-touch-icon.png | Script Slug | https://www.scriptslug.com/script/the-gambler-2014 | RSS
Articles | Scripts
Data provided by Asset 3
This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 13 | https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movies/the-gambler-2014.html | en | THE GAMBLER (2014) - Movieguide | [
"https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1078982112261039&ev=PageView&noscript=1",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/movieguide-logo.png",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/movieguide-logo@2x.png",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gambler.jpg",
"https:/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Review"
] | 2014-12-17T01:09:37+00:00 | Is THE GAMBLER (2014) family friendly? Find out only at Movieguide. The Family and Christian Guide to Movie Reviews and Entertainment News. | en | Movieguide | The Family Guide to Movies & Entertainment | https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movies/the-gambler-2014.html | THE GAMBLER is a remake of the 1974 movie starring James Caan about an associate professor of English with a gambling addiction who must find a way to pay off two gangsters, or else. The movie is smartly directed, with nice camerawork, acting and terrific sound that adds tremendously to this movie’s dark and intense mood. It has constant abundant foul language, however, and solves the plot problem for the protagonist with more gambling.
Mark Wahlberg stars as Associate English Professor James Bennett, who wrote a novel with middling success. After his elderly grandfather’s death, the movie shows James going into an illegal gambling establishment operating in a mansion in the Malibu Hills high above the Pacific Ocean. Though he owes the casino’s Asian owner, Mister Lee, $240,000, James promptly loses the $10,000 he brought with him, then borrows $50,000 from a black gangster, Neville, who’s apparently roaming the illegal casino looking for gamblers to stake. He gives Mister Lee $40,000 of the $50K, but gambles away the rest. Now, James still owes about $260,000 to Lee and Neville, and only has seven days to pay off the two debts.
Back at college, James tells his literature students that writing for a living is useless unless you are a true genius who’s willing to take big risks. Don’t strive for mediocrity, he advises. He tells the class that only one student, a pretty young blonde woman named Amy Phillips, qualifies as a writing genius, but he chastises her for not taking great risks. While James lectures, the star basketball player in his class, a young man named Lamar Allen, is too busy playing with his cell-phone to pay much attention. The college is putting pressure on James to help focus Lamar on passing the class so he can keep playing basketball.
After some threats from Mister Lee and Neville, James gets the money to pay off his debts from his wealthy mother, who’s not very happy with her son. However, he goes with Amy to a legal casino in Palm Springs, where he loses all the money at blackjack. After this happens, Neville threatens both Amy and his mother if James doesn’t come up with the money.
James goes to see a menacing loan shark named Frank, played by John Goodman. Frank lectures James about taking too many risks. He tells James that, if he gives him the money to pay off his gambling debts, Frank will show no mercy at all when James can’t make his weekly interest payments. Wisely, James decides not to borrow Frank’s money.
Neville finds out that Lamar Allen attends James’ class. He proposes that, to pay off his debt, James will get Lamar to win the next game by only seven points, but James has a better idea. His idea wins him the money to pay off Mister Lee, but James decides to borrow more money from both Frank and Mister Lee in a gutsy play to risk everything. The collateral for the loans will be his own life.
Rupert Wyatt, who directed RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the first movie in the recent reboot of that franchise, is a talented filmmaker. He does a bang-up job here, getting Mark Wahlberg to give one of his best performances, and doing the same with John Goodman, who plays the loan shark, and Jessica Lange, who plays the mother. The new script is based on James Toback’s acclaimed screenplay for the 1974 movie THE GAMBLER, starring James Caan of THE GODFATHER, ELF and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. The sound design in this GAMBLER is particularly powerful. It gives more gravitas to the actors’ voices, especially in the scenes between Wahlberg and Goodman and between Wahlberg and Michael Kenneth Williams (from HBO’s BOARDWALK EMPIRE), who plays Neville.
That said, THE GAMBLER has about 100 or more “f” bombs. There’s also a brief scene set in a strip club. Of course, the story involves a lot of gambling. Eventually, more gambling resolves the plot problem, and the protagonist believes that risking everything is the only way to live. Hence, the movie’s tagline, “The only way out is all in.” So, ultimately, media-wise viewers will find THE GAMBLER to be unacceptable entertainment. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 11 | https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-gambler | en | The Gambler Movie Review | [
"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_1_1_small.png",
"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_16_9_small.png 350w,/components/src/commonkit_components/ck_image/images/ratio_16_9_xsmall.png 240w",
"https://w... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jeffrey M. Anderson"
] | 2014-12-17T00:00:00 | Uneven remake makes gambling look dangerous, alluring. Read Common Sense Media's The Gambler review, age rating, and parents guide. | en | /themes/custom/common_sense/images/favicons/favicon-16x16.png | Common Sense Media | https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-gambler | THE GAMBLER is yet another Hollywood remake, and, as usual, it's not as good as the original. In this case, that would be the superior The Gambler (1974), which was directed by Karel Reisz, written by James Toback, and starred James Caan. That movie captured a moment, while the remake merely copies one. Still, taking the new movie all by itself, it does have a certain kind of resonance. And, like the original, it also has something to say about the human condition.
Wahlberg is mesmerizing in the lead role, reckless and assured but helplessly drawn to underworld life -- and at the same time confronting his students with harsh realities about writing. Writer William Monahan (The Departed) crafts a script full of stylized dialogue, giving actors like John Goodman snappy stuff to chew on. And director Rupert Wyatt plunges his characters into a slick-sleazy vision of a gambler's world. In a way, it's more alluring and less profound than the original, but enough of a cautionary tale that it's still worth a look. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 27 | https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/23/the-gambler-review | en | The Gambler Review | [
"https://cdn.ziffstatic.com/adchoices/adchoices.png",
"https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/12/gambler_121814_1600.jpg?width=3840",
"https://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/10/22/gamblerjpg-7a87c8.jpg?width=114&auto=webp",
"https://images.justwatch.com/icon/190848813/s100",
"https://images.justwat... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Matt Patches"
] | 2014-12-23T00:00:00 | The Gambler, starring Mark Wahlberg, makes up for its philosophical shortcomings with high-stakes sparring. | en | https://kraken.ignimgs.com/favicon.ico | IGN | https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/23/the-gambler-review | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 89 | https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B000062UHC/ref%3Dpd_aw_vtp_h_pd_aw_vtp_h_m_sccl_3_cr/000-0000000-0000000%3Fpd_rd_w%3DUW0iL%26content-id%3Damzn1.sym.727ba07a-a079-4d60-94d2-53c154fc990a%26pf_rd_p%3D727ba07a-a079-4d60-94d2-53c154fc990a%26pf_rd_r%3D5V2X4ZSY4ABCAAYK9WPT%26pd_rd_wg%3DalK4U%26pd_rd_r%3D812dc66a-eff3-4b05-bdb0-7d5fd8bed19a%26pd_rd_i%3DB000062UHC | en | Amazon.com | [
"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/captcha/dddfleoy/Captcha_sbxhtumxtu.jpg",
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/oc-csi/1/OP/requestId=YZ6ABCAXZA6VANCKWFTN&js=0"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | null | Enter the characters you see below
Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 31 | https://literalab.com/2012/02/24/dostoevskys-the-gambler-modern-and-loosely-based/ | en | Dostoevsky’s The Gambler: Modern and loosely based | [
"https://literalab.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gamblerforkgzj5-e1330104595825.jpg?w=200&h=150&crop=1",
"https://literalab.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/51sx6d9k6tl-_sl160_.jpg?w=630",
"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=literalab-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000062UHC",
"https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/a5cc6a00b59366871... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Mike Monson"
] | 2012-02-24T00:00:00 | In the 1974 film The Gambler, James Caan plays a Jewish college professor in New York named Axel Freed with an addiction to risk that causes him to fall into major gambling debt to some heavy-hande… | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/336a3a2e72b76ee8bd159864102d7e5202d5e57889458bccc512d443a4130e93?s=32 | literalab | https://literalab.com/2012/02/24/dostoevskys-the-gambler-modern-and-loosely-based/ | In the 1974 film The Gambler, James Caan plays a Jewish college professor in New York named Axel Freed with an addiction to risk that causes him to fall into major gambling debt to some heavy-handed loan sharks. In the first classroom scene we see him in Freed waxes poetic about the issues in Dostoevsky’s work.
The film brilliantly weaves the intellectual issues brought up with the tension-filled story of a man desperately trying to come up with $44,000 to pay his bookie back along with his inevitably gambling that money away once he gets it. But beyond that there is little connection with Dostoevsky’s novella and except for the brutal and amazing final scene, not much Dostoevskyan about the film as a whole.
That shouldn’t take away from what an excellent film it is. James Caan’s performance perfectly captures the blend of intellect, boldness and fatality that is Axel Freed. The acting in general is outstanding, with the loan sharks and bookies played by Paul Sorvino, Burt Young (Rocky’s brother-in-law) and Vic Tayback (best-known from the horrible 70s TV series Alice) standing out. The direction by Ostrava-born Karel Reisz (who was saved from the Nazis as one of Winton’s children and went on to direct a classic of the “angry young men” movement of UK film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) is also first rate, and the way he freezes some of the moments where Axel holds his fate in his hands is especially brilliant.
Yet it wasn’t until Taxi Driver was released two years later that a film really carried Dostoevsky’s themes onto the screen, all the more effectively for having no direct connection to the book its story resembles – Crime and Punishment.
Remaking remakes
So it is ironic that it is Taxi Driver’s Martin Scorsese that wants to remake The Gambler of 1974 with Leonardo di Caprio in the title role. If doing a remake of a modernized adaptation of a book seems strange, it probably is because it is strange. One of the articles I read about the future project – slated for late 2012 or 2014 at the earliest – even made the logical mistake of thinking Scorsese was going to film the Dostoevsky original.
One person not at all happy with Scorsese’s decision is the original screenwriter, James Toback, whose autobiography gave his adaptation its shape. He was all the more incensed that Scorsese plans to use the original film’s producers.
In a furious response to the news Toback has written an article describing the genesis of his screenplay and its journey towards becoming a film, including the gem that he originally wanted to use the then little-known actor Robert DeNiro as Axel Freed. Later leads suggested were Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.
“Axel Freed is a New York Jew,” I said.
“Redford’s a great actor,” Medavoy countered, “he can play anything.”
The Gambler – Hungarian/Romanian style
In the meantime Dostoevsky’s book is getting another modern and loosely-based treatment by Hungarian director Szabolcs Hajdu, director of the award-winning Bibliothèque Pascal. Currently in production (or post-production) the film shows an Eastern European family in Las Vegas, with a cast of Romanian and Hungarian actors. It is supposed to show how a family that loses their dignity in the maelstrom of Las Vegas casinos and what they represent.
Interestingly, the majority of directors who adapted The Gambler have been not only European but, with two Hungarians and a Czech, from Central Europe (not counting any Russian versions). I don’t think this holds for adaptations of Dostoevsky’s other novels, but who knows. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 8 | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a31626/the-gambler-mark-wahlberg/ | en | Mark Wahlberg Has a McConaissance in The Gambler | [
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/fre/static/icons/search.f1c199c.svg",
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/fre/static/icons/close.38e3324.svg",
"https://www.esquire.com/_assets/design-tokens/esquire/static/images/logos/logo.20861e6.svg?primary=navLogoColor",
"https://www.esquire.com/_... | [] | [] | [
"mark wahlberg",
"movie",
"culture blog",
"culture blog"
] | null | [
"Stephen Marche"
] | 2014-12-25T09:00:00-05:00 | Mark Wahlberg's risk-taking part in a risk-taking movie. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/esquire/static/images/favicon.9bd3ce0.ico | Esquire | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a31626/the-gambler-mark-wahlberg/ | The Gambler is the ultimate prestige piece. The original novel on which the film is based is one of Dostoevsky's shorter (and therefore filmable) masterpieces, and the original film from 1974, written by James Toback, was James Caan's attempt at being Marlon Brando. And he very nearly succeeded. It was certainly Caan's greatest film—although it has become something of a lost classic today. The 2014 update, starring Mark Wahlberg, isn't just his most ambitious film. It's a signal of a new stage in his career. This is Marky Mark running as far from the Funky Bunch as he can, into the realm of high art. It is a hugely ambitious, hugely risky performance in a hugely ambitious, hugely risky movie, whose gutsiness you have to respect.
The 2014 update to The Gambler modernizes the story from the 1974 film, but only slightly. The size of the debt is greater now; the role of organized crime changed to reflect the disintegration of the mafia into bite-sized ethnically diverse cadres. The capacity to gamble legally virtually everywhere in the United States means that long flights to Vegas are no longer required in order to lose everything you have. Despite these cosmetic changes, the movie stays true to the basic psychological truth contained in the original novel by Dostoevsky. A professor of literature, facing the twin crises of the death of the family patriarch and his own lack of creative greatness, responds by gambling at higher and higher stakes. The trouble in which he finds himself, forced to humiliate himself in front of his mother and deal with violent predators, is what he craves: a form of degradation that also contains within it a peculiar exaltation—the sense that he is both less than and greater than ordinary men. He pursues cards and roulette as a replica of grace, a form of divine communion, in which despair is as much existential as it is financial. It's not so much that he wants to lose but that he wants to place himself in a state beyond his own control. He wants to put himself in the hands of the universe, even if the universe is virtually guaranteed to destroy him.
It's heady, intellectual stuff. And it does take some getting used to seeing Wahlberg discussing Robert Greene's criticism of Shakespeare's early plays and the significance of the number of bullets fired by the hero of Albert Camus's The Stranger. Wahlberg has lost a significant amount of weight for the role and he looks weak, diseased, exactly unlike the guy from the Calvin Klein underwear ads and exactly like a man who has rendered himself sallow smoking in dark rooms. The action itself—watching Wahlberg gamble—is riveting. The tension is almost unbearable, surprisingly so in a plot with very little violence other than implied violence.
Wahlberg, who produced the movie as well as starred in it, hasn't flinched from surrounding himself with a cast of the best actors in America, either. Jessica Lange is quietly devastating as the guilt-ridden mother. John Goodman plays a philosophical loan shark and Michael K. Williams, always unforgettable, a gangster with a sense of humor. Wahlberg has put himself up against the kind of actors who steal scenes in every film or television show they appear in. Wahlberg lies back and lets them steal, while he broods.
Wahlberg is in the same position as his character: "Ultimate victory or death," he says during one of the more or less continuous scenes of self-analysis. "Nothing in between." This is the crisis of his character: He will not submit to being merely a good writer; he has to be Shakespeare. And the film itself indulges roughly the same gamble: This is either a great performance in a great work of art or it is a humiliating attempt by a poser. Nothing in between. It can be both, at times. At moments, The Gambler deflates to excruciating embarrassments, as in the unconvincing scenes of professorial grandeur. At other times it soars, in the glamorous nightmare of high-stakes underground clubs. Ultimately, the soaring redeems the deflating. The weakness is forgotten in the glare of the greatness.
What is most heartening about the film, however, is what it means about the position of leading men in Hollywood. From the beginning The Gambler has been a dangerous work of art. Dostoevsky wrote it under conditions of nearly impossible duress. In the middle of an addiction to gambling, in order to raise money, he made an insane deal with a publisher that he would complete a significant novel within a few months or else lose control of his publishing rights for nine years. He would literally fall back from the roulette tables, dictate portions to his wife-to-be, and then return to the tables. The Gambler has always been about creative risk-taking as much as financial risk-taking. It was probably not entirely sane for James Caan or Mark Wahlberg to make their film versions. But they were driven to it. Sometimes, you have to do something insane to prove to yourself that you're fully human. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 3 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/plotsummary/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:147-1269849-4338218:0H4BGH7VKVNJQGWJCJZB$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3D0H4BGH7VKVNJQGWJCJZB:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjIzODE3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUwNzYwMzE@._V1_QL75_UX90_CR0,3,90,133_.jpg",
"https://m.media-amazon.co... | [] | [] | [
"Movie Plot",
"Plot Summary",
"Plot Synopsis"
] | null | [] | null | The Gambler (2014) - Plot summary, synopsis, and more... | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/plotsummary/ | Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) is a Los Angeles literature professor with a severe gambling addiction caused by his view of the world as either having it all or having nothing. Jim goes to a high-stake gambling den right after attending this grandfather's funeral. This father, Jonathan, left him nothing in his will. Jim plays blackjack and quickly wins a few games to reach $80,000. But then he starts to lose and has to borrow money from the den to cover his bets.
Jim ends up owing $240,000 to Lee (Alvin Ing), the proprietor of an underground gambling ring, and another $50,000 to Neville Baraka (Michael K. Williams), a loan shark. Baraka had seen Jim play and loose at Lee's den and was impressed with his style. Jim asked Baraka to stake him money, but Baraka asks for a 20% interest. Jim once again wins $160,000 in a few rounds of Blackjack, but then decides to bet everything on Black in roulette. Baraka says that he has been watching Red come up all night. Jim loses everything on Black, when it comes out Red. Lee gives Bennett seven days to pay off his debts or be murdered.
During one of his classes, Bennett identifies student Amy Phillips (Brie Larson) as a potential writing prodigy, having previously encountered her as a waitress at Lee's gambling house. Amy admits that she started reading when she was only 2 years old and comes from a normal middle-class family. Jim tells his class that in every profession only the genius thrives. Yet, literature is one profession where everyone believes that they can write a novel. Jim says that one should not bother, if they are not a genius. Bennett also singles out Dexter (Emory Cohen), a genius tennis star (who is after both fame and money and wants to achieve the highest level in the sport. But when he started 5 years ago, he was naturally better than everybody else). Jim later confronts Lamar Allen (Anthony Kelley) in the next class. Lamar is a student who does not pay attention in class and intends to become an NBA basketball player. The college is putting pressure on Jim to pass Lamar regardless, as they want him playing professional basketball, which is worth a lot more to the college. Lamar pushes back saying that he is not at ease with his celebrity status in college and wants to live his life as a normal person, without others telling him what to do. Lamar says that he has a knee injury and yet nobody listens to him. Amy develops a personal interest in the professor. Jim tries very hard to keep Amy away from himself. But Amy is persistent and wants to have a relationship with him. Jim slowly warms up to her.
Bennett considers borrowing money from Frank (John Goodman), another loan shark, to consolidate his debts (Frank demands 10% interest per week for a loan of $260,000. Frank also knows that Jim has never repaid a debt in his entire life) and buy himself some time but refuses to do so after Frank's demands include that Bennett admit, "I am not a man." Big Ernie (Domenick Lombardozzi) is Frank's collection man. Bennett convinces his mother Roberta (Jessica Lange) to give him enough money to pay off his debts, expressing no gratitude to her, then during a trip to a casino with Amy, Jim gambles it all away. Amy is impressed with Jim's ice-cold nerves and his philosophy towards life and has sex with him. Baraka and Lee both want their money back and are getting anxious and only 2 days are left. Jim asks Lee to stake him another $100,000 to win enough to pay Lee back. Baraka wanted Jim to give him Lamar's number, but Jim refuses as Lamar is his student and didn't want him tangled with loan sharks. Baraka kidnaps Bennett, has him beaten and forces him into an ultimatum-if he does not convince Lamar to win one of his college basketball games by a margin of 7 points or less, he will murder Amy.
Amy comes by to meet Jim, but he rudely sends her away for her own safety. Jim goes to Frank, who advises him to change his version of a "f**k you" attitude towards life by getting enough money to build a safe house and make reliable low yield investments, for protection against his severe gambling losses. Frank lends him $260,000 to pay his debt to Lee, but also threatens to kill everyone in Jim's personal life if he is not repaid. Lee's men assault Jim when he comes to ask Lee to stake him $150,000, saying the only way he can pay the full $410,000 debt to Lee and Frank is to gamble and win. He uses the $150,000 to bribe Lamar (Lamar had earlier to the deal with Jim, as he knew that due to his bad knee, he will not be able to play professional baseball. He needs to make money before the knee blows out) into doing the basketball point-shaving scheme. Jim sends Dexter to Las Vegas to bet on the basketball game with the $260,000 he got from Frank. Lamar succeeds, so Jim uses his winnings to pay his debt to Baraka, denying he knows anything about the large bet made in Vegas.
Jim then convinces both Lee and Frank to meet him in a neutral gambling den, where he wagers enough money to pay both men off-if he wins-on a single roulette spin. Successful, he leaves the money at the club for Lee and Frank saying, "I am not a gambler." The payment to Frank is more than he owed; Frank finds Jim and offers to give back the "cream" but, to Frank's amusement, Jim responds "F**k you". On an apparent adrenaline rush, Jim runs miles through the city to arrive at Amy's apartment; he is broke, but free from debt. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 2 | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gambler-2014 | en | The Gambler movie review & film summary (2014) | [
"https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-content/themes/roger-ebert/source/images/roger-ebert-logo.svg",
"https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-content/themes/roger-ebert/source/images/search-thin.svg",
"https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-content/themes/roger-ebert/source/images/stars-fill.svg",
"https://www.rogerebert.com/wp-conte... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Dopey parable about risk-taker is a sucker bet that benefits from three wicked supporting turns by John Goodman, Michael K. Williams and Alvin Ing. The lead character craps out big time. | en | Roger Ebert | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gambler-2014 | “The Gambler” should have been called “Three Supporting Characters in Search of a Lead.” A gaunt Mark Wahlberg stares out from the poster, his name is above the title, and he’s in almost every frame of this remake, but his character may as well be non-existent. In scenes with Michael K. Williams, John Goodman and Alvin Ing, Wahlberg evaporates into thin air. The screenplay gives him one note to play, which becomes tiresome as the minutes drag on. While that trio of actors control entire sections of the orchestra, Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett stands there waiting to ding out a note on a triangle.
This retooling of the 1974 James Caan film is completely devoid of the grit, nastiness and desperation of the Karel Reisz-James Toback original. Caan’s character was memorable because one sensed that his film might do something awful to him, or worse, that his character might self-destruct and harm himself. By comparison, the 2014 version never indicates that it will maim and/or kill risk-taker Jim Bennett. It’s too in love with his cocky, unflappable arrogance in the face of danger. No matter how dire the situation, Bennett’s escape is never in doubt. This format works well for action movies and superhero yarns; not so much for dramas.
“The Gambler” refuses to acknowledge that Bennett has a gambling addiction. It tries justifying Bennett’s actions by tying them to the existential works he teaches in his college literature class. In that class is Amy (Brie Larson, so great in “Short Term 12”), whose character description sounds like it fell out of a filing cabinet at New World Pictures: College student by day, cocktail waitress in illegal gambling den by night. She knows of Bennett’s reckless abandon with other people’s money at the casino run by Mister Lee (Ing), and I guess it turns her on or something. It’s as good an interpretation of her character as any, because Larson is given less to play here than she got in “Don Jon”.
As Bennett digs deeper holes for himself, every confrontation between him and another character plays like a “very special episode” of an 80’s sitcom. People rant and rave at Bennett, calling him on the carpet for numerous offenses and mistakes as a means of teaching him a valuable lesson. Sometimes they rough him up a bit for emphasis. Then they completely forget about teaching lessons and bend to his will. Jessica Lange, as Bennett’s super-rich Mom, slaps him around when he asks her for the $240,000 he needs to clean up his latest mess. Lange’s over-the-top chastising scene would shame Joan Crawford, but she goes to the bank to get Bennett the money anyway.
Scenes like this occur with the aforementioned trio of Ing, Goodman and Williams, but they know how to toy with screenwriter William Monahan’s preposterous, purple macho prose and posturing. They play the material at odd angles while Wahlberg plays it so straight he’s upstaged at every turn. In these mini-movies, they become the stars and the lead becomes an extra. As Mister Lee, Ing delivers his lines in a smooth, ice cold fashion that’s fun to watch. Goodman plays his entire role topless, and turns the F-word into poetry. Most effective of the trio is Williams, whose Neville serves as a charming mentor to Bennett without losing the “dangerous Black man” edge that Toback’s earlier films liked to fetishize.
Bennett borrows money from each of them, and since he’s originally indebted to Lee’s casino, Lee’s loans are akin to borrowing from Peter to pay Peter. Every so often, one of the three shows up to inquire about their money, and they’re always one step ahead of Bennett. Each knows when he has borrowed from the other, as if a “Bennett Alert” popped up on their phones prior to the scene. What I would have given for scenes where Ing, Goodman and Williams sat around exchanging information and laughing maniacally about how they can’t hurt Bennett too badly lest they upset the audience. This movie should be about them.
Since the plot hinges on whether Bennett can successfully juggle all his schemes and make his big score pay off, it isn’t unreasonable to ask that “The Gambler” get one’s heart racing. But director Rupert Wyatt is too busy trying to be arty and daring with his visuals and soundtrack juxtapositions to think about pacing. In one unwise sequence, Dinah Washington’s classic “This Bitter Earth” plays over extraneous footage of writhing, naked strippers, leaving one to ask “just how bitter IS the earth in the Champagne Room?” In another, Bennett runs what appears to be a marathon, only to arrive at a destination the movie wrongly assumes is bittersweet.
Look, I get it. This is supposed to be some kind of fable-slash-parable. But even the wimpiest fairy tales have some form of credible threat. When various minions finally do pummel Bennett for his sins, I thought “eh, he’ll be all right.” And he was. Where’s the drama in that? | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 9 | https://inreviewonline.com/2014/12/23/the-gambler/ | en | In Review Online | [
"https://inreviewonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/inro-new-logo-medium.png",
"https://inreviewonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gambler-scaled.jpg",
"https://inreviewonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/limitsofcontrol-520x400.jpg",
"https://inreviewonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/limitsofcont... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"In Review"
] | 2014-12-23T00:00:00 | If you haven’t seen Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler before seeing Rupert Wyatt’s new Mark Wahlberg-starring remake, don’t watch it in close proximity to the new version. Here is yet another classic case of an original that makes the flaws of the remake seem that much harsher. There’s some wonderful mise-en-abyme surrounding Reisz’s original. James Toback wrote the heavily autobiographical script about a Jewish college English professor with a deeply self-destructive gambling problem while he himself was leading a double life as a heavy-duty gambler and English professor at the City College of New York. Toback originally embarked upon writing the script (which first started as a novel) as a sort of homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler — and Dostoevsky, who was himself a heavy gambler, wrote the novel in order to pay off his gambling debts. Toback/Reisz’s The Gambler is in the pantheon of Robert Altman’s California Split and Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels, films about gambling that are able to create genuine and detailed portraits of the thrill of the game and the debilitation of the compulsion, the addiction. The failure of the remake lies in its near-complete failure to dive into a gambler’s psychology. In the Toback/Reisz film, it is clear that […] | en | In Review Online | https://inreviewonline.com/2014/12/23/the-gambler/ | If you haven’t seen Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler before seeing Rupert Wyatt’s new Mark Wahlberg-starring remake, don’t watch it in close proximity to the new version. Here is yet another classic case of an original that makes the flaws of the remake seem that much harsher. There’s some wonderful mise-en-abyme surrounding Reisz’s original. James Toback wrote the heavily autobiographical script about a Jewish college English professor with a deeply self-destructive gambling problem while he himself was leading a double life as a heavy-duty gambler and English professor at the City College of New York. Toback originally embarked upon writing the script (which first started as a novel) as a sort of homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler — and Dostoevsky, who was himself a heavy gambler, wrote the novel in order to pay off his gambling debts. Toback/Reisz’s The Gambler is in the pantheon of Robert Altman’s California Split and Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels, films about gambling that are able to create genuine and detailed portraits of the thrill of the game and the debilitation of the compulsion, the addiction. The failure of the remake lies in its near-complete failure to dive into a gambler’s psychology. In the Toback/Reisz film, it is clear that the reason James Caan (despite being from an incredibly wealthy family, having a beautiful blonde girlfriend, and a reasonably good job) is willing to risk losing everything — money, girlfriend, even his life — is precisely because he is in love with the sensation of risk that comes with the gamble. For that reason, it’s telling that, in one of his university lectures, Caan speaks about how William Carlos Williams reaches the conclusion that George Washington is not really the ideal American because what Washington fears most is risk. Or, perhaps, he is the ideal in that what we want is to lead lives that reduce risk to a zero, where everything is planned and we feel in control of our own fate. For Caan’s gambler, however, this is the ugly antithesis of what it means to be alive; he finds intoxication in the moments before the card flips over or the ball comes to rest on the roulette wheel — the moment before all is revealed, when fate could still swing either way.
no one associated with this film knows a lick about gamblers or addiction | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 0 | 0 | http://thereddragon.co.uk/tag/70/page/2/ | en | 70 Archives - Page 2 of 5 The Red Dragon | http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/images/headers/trolley.jpg | [
"http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/images/headers/trolley.jpg",
"http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/15.jpg",
"http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PG.jpg",
"http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/12A.jpg",
"http://thereddragon.co.uk/wp-c... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"The Red Dragon"
] | 2015-03-04T21:59:36+00:00 | en | The Red Dragon | http://thereddragon.co.uk/tag/70/page/2/ | Rating : 70/100 102 Min
The latest Disney animated feature film is set in the near future in the fictional San Fransokyo, an impression of what San Francisco might be like if it were in Japan (unless they have gone all ‘Watchmen’ on the story and Japan won World War II, this is not elaborated on) which has allowed the illustrators to tinker with a more Japanese style of animation for various elements in the film (alas, no easily discernible hentai on display). It’s based on the little known Marvel comic of the same name, which Disney is at liberty to adapt having bought over Marvel some years ago now and in fact there are a number of elements similar to the character of Iron Man which are a little distracting, but again they don’t have to worry about encroaching on copyright. It’s a bit of a departure for Disney in many ways as their productions are often marked by their originality, whereas here it is a fairly familiar superhero set-up, admittedly with extremely finessed graphical work.
Hiro (Ryan Potter) is a young tech aficionado whose parents passed away in a tragic accident. His brother creates a medical robot, Baymax (Scott Adsit), who becomes Hiro’s closest friend and adventuring companion when a mysterious fire not only destroys his world changing microbots he had been working on, but also sadly claims the life of his brother as well. Baymax has a bulky frame but one created largely via an inflatable exterior, thus differing from all other big-screen mechanoids, and he brings much needed light relief to the film as the duo are accidentally flung into investigating what really happened on that fateful day.
On his journey of self discovery Hiro will have to question his own feelings of rage, as well as what role other people should play in his life – the other engineers from his brother’s lab are concerned about his welfare but he initially keeps them at a distance, for example. All of these elements are resolved and delivered in a fairly two dimensional way, but there is action aplenty and it all looks and feels fresh enough to entertain even if it is going to appeal in a grander way to a younger demographic rather than adults. Maya Rudolph, Jamie Chung, Alan Tudyk and James Cromwell (as Professor Callaghan – a reference to Harry Callaghan, aka ‘Dirty’ Harry, San Francisco’s very own urban diplomacy expert) are the most recognisable names in the supporting line-up and, as you might imagine, there are Easter eggs galore to spot throughout the film.
Rating : 70/100 99 Min
An endearingly sweet film that sees central character Megan (Keira Knightley) realise that a decade after the end of high school her life hasn’t really changed all that much compared to her peers and when her boyfriend, the same one from high school, proposes to her she panics and bunks off for a week to live with sixteen year old Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), whom she befriended after being successfully entreated by the latter to purchase alcohol for her and her mates. Initially, it’s like a breath of fresh air compared to the stuffy seriousness of her more grown up friends but Annika’s father (Sam Rockwell) isn’t exactly impressed when he finds a strange woman sleeping over with his daughter, but since the woman in question is Keira Knightley he quickly decides to get over it and tries to bang her anyway, complicating matters further.
Megan is shown to be carefree but still grounded enough to like – in fact, she has a playfulness about her that is absolutely necessary for adult life and which her friends seem to have forgotten, and this in no small way comes from Knightley herself, shining through into her character quite naturally. Set in America, Megan sports an accent that is at times applied a little too thickly but when a bit more subdued is perfect, and the film is directed by Lynn Shelton who enjoyed success with another comic drama centred around three main characters in 2012’s ‘Your Sister’s Sister’. Some of the comedy here could have done with a few hammer blows to make it stand out a bit more, but it’s quite impressive for a debut screenplay, from writer Andrea Seigel, and the movie is amiable, fun and has a great starring turn from the leading lady herself. Look out for the bit where she flips a sign for her father’s company, all dressed in white – almost like the universal obverse of her Coco Mademoiselle adverts (the ones with the bike and the jumpsuit), and also where she convinces one of the young girls to step up to the plate and tell the boy she likes how she feels, a refreshing and sensible change from the norm.
Keira Knightley recently posed topless for Interview magazine (if you are ever thinking of doing it again Keira, I can offer you tea and biscuits …) to highlight the endemic and somewhat ridiculous use of the fake enhancement of women’s breasts in the media, as she herself has famously had this applied to her own image multiple times by the industry, on the likes of the advertising surrounding ‘King Arthur’ (04) for example, and indeed she wants the photoshoot to propagate for that reason. Ah, human female breasts, fascinating for all sorts of reasons – such as their unique existence within the animal kingdom, human females being the only primates that have protuberant breasts all year round and not just when they have milk in them, demonstrating their primary sexual role and the importance of sex for the human species – whether you argue for pleasure or pair bonding. Indeed, a strong theory is that when your ancestors first walked upright, the females had no breasts, as we would describe them now, and they simply evolved to mimic the buttocks as seen from behind – providing a sexual image from both directions.
The concept of one’s own body compared to another’s is so often manipulated to a sickening degree in the modern Western world, and The Red Dragon’s own personal view has always been to regard it as impossible to criticise one’s looks without also disrespecting your ancestors, and in particular your family. To them you are the most beautiful thing in the entire cosmos and you only hurt them unimaginably by putting yourself down, but not only that if you take a common complaint such as the shape of one’s nose – this evolved in order to adapt itself to the air your ancestors had to breathe, as when it reaches your lungs the air must be within a certain range of temperature and humidity and the nose is nature’s filter, thus not only does its shape point directly to where your antecedents lived but it was also a great aid in their comfortable survival and indeed your very existence, thus you should be proud and grateful – not wanting to change it just to look like someone else. Plus, it really doesn’t matter what you look like so long as you take care of what you’ve got and enjoy it – I mean Keira is quite obviously the best among you but then she has to suffer lots of unwanted attention and screeds of text about her look and people analysing every inch of her body, and ultimately even if one person thinks you are a one out of ten, someone else will think you are a ten – just don’t waste any time or thought on the ones, and as for female’s breasts your femininity is the entirety of your body, mind and soul combined and each elemental part is what makes you unique and special – embrace what you look like, enjoy the truly remarkable creature that you are and for both sexes remember – a genuine smile is always attractive. See below for a mathematical analysis of romance and dating, from another rather appetising human morsel …
Rating : 70/100 101 Min
Good escapist fun spliced with sex appeal and a good heart. The marketing for this was a little deceptive in that it suggested Michael Bay was reuniting with his muse Megan Fox for what would be a ‘Transformers’ (07) style movie centering around 80’s cartoon heroes Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello, a.k.a..the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles filmed on the big-screen before in the early nineties and briefly in animated form in 2007’s ‘TMNT’. Bay did finance the film but it’s actually Jonathan Liebesman (‘Wrath of the Titans’ 12, ‘Battle Los Angeles’ 11) that directs it, although he does so in such a way that really we do get a Transformers esque movie to such an extent that if you liked that film you will probably enjoy this too, replete as it is with over the top CGI action sequences and the blatant sexploitation of Ms Fox (as ballsy reporter April O’Neil) and I have to say it’s a pretty winning formula, in fact if you were looking for clips of the best examples of the human female derrière on film then you would absolutely be wanting to sample a couple of choice moments from this film.
The story, including an apt nod to their comic book ancestry, delivers the origin of the Turtles for the universe – sole survivors of a fire in a genetics research facility who are trained underground by their master Splinter to become crime fighting powerhouses, and who are then pitted against their arch nemesis Shredder (Tohoru Masamune). Most of the action is over the top but remains entertaining on some level, perhaps bar one ridiculous downhill scene that goes on forever, and most of the characters are fine, with the exception of Will Arnett’s slightly cringe worthy foil/love interest for Fox, but it would have been great to have seen more real ninja/ninjutsu training go on – the sort where you feel you’ve actually learned something and maybe even a bit of athletics rudimentary enough to practice at home, like somersaulting whilst throwing shurikens for example. Alan Ritchson, Johnny Knoxville, Noel Fisher and Jeremy Howard provide the voices of the Turtles and this certainly ticks all the right boxes for the younger demographic it’s primarily aimed at, and I’ve no problem admitting I managed to get a couple of hours of light and frothy entertainment out of it as well.
One of the reasons to watch the film …
Rating : 70/100 102 Min
A documentary from filmmaker Anthony Baxter and essentially a follow up to his hit 2011 film ‘You’ve Been Trumped’, which showed the effects of Donald Trump’s exclusive multi-million dollar golf course built in the rural landscape of the Northeast of Scotland, Balmedie in Aberdeenshire to be precise, and here we continue that story (he finally even manages to bag an interview with Trump himself after the shock waves the first film caused) whilst it is expanded to look at the environmental and economic impact of building courses in other areas of the world, in particular the historic seaside town of Dubrovnik where one is planned for the summit of the hill overlooking the town and would require syphoning off huge amounts of the town’s water supply, and indeed the issue sparks the first local referendum in Croatia’s modern day history.
Golf is a hideous game for the rich as far as The Red Dragon is concerned, in theory I have nothing against it and the activity should be a nice enterprise for those who would like some moderate exercise outdoors, in practise it is dominated by snobs and we have, in Scotland, golf courses all over the place – Edinburgh alone seems to have about five or six of them, all areas that could be public parks for general use. When I was young I was told I wouldn’t be allowed onto my local course as, despite turning up with my friends and having saved enough money to play, I apparently did not own enough clubs. I had a driver, a putter and maybe four or five irons – basically they were saying I was too poor to play as, after all, what would it look like if they let local kids that couldn’t afford a full golf set onto their greens? I mean, they can’t be seen to be encouraging young commoners to play, right? We might even beat them, imagine! We got our own back by sneaking onto the course at night for free anyway.
In short, fuck golf.
The game has also recently become one of the new sports added to the Olympic Games, and it beat squash to claim the place, which is just about the most ridiculous thing ever and of course has everything to do with the money that the ‘sport’ will bring to the games. Sad to say golf was invented in Scotland, although it is amazing the number of outdoor activities Britain in general has given the world given our somewhat inclement weather.
The documentary invites poignant discussion on the sheer amount of precious water that is used and wasted to keep the greens green in places where grass does not naturally grow – like the desert in Nevada where we see an exclusive retreat going out of business, or in the Middle East where a Tiger Woods designed course has had to be put on hold indefinitely because IT’S STUPID. We hear an interview with Alec Baldwin who has fought against a new golf enterprise in his native Long Island amid legitimate fears that the chemicals used on the grass can and will sink into the water supply for the area, and back in Scotland we see the effects on the local people of the building of Trump’s monstrosity, as one elderly woman in her nineties is left permanently without any running water and walls of earth are deliberately erected around other homes – and all of these people are constituents of Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond, who appears to have fobbed off the beleaguered locals and done absolutely nothing to help them. Not content with this destruction, we learn Trump plans a second course beside the first and has the audacity to complain, legally, about the building of an offshore wind farm as he reckons it might ruin the view of the pigs he’ll have over for dinner. Unbelievable.
The Dubrovnik course is another very interesting major part of the film. However, criticism has to be levelled at the documentary as to how balanced a view we are receiving. Here, for example, an important vote is ruled invalid by the mayor of the town as, according to him, not enough people turned up to vote. Baxter tells us that the vote was carried by eighty percent of the ballot voting against the new construction, but the film never actually tells us what percentage of the town’s populace did come out to vote, so we are given the distinct impression that the mayor is corrupt but if ultimately only, say, ten percent of the township bothered to vote then the mayor would be quite right in considering it insubstantial constitutionally. It’s a little subtle with the momentum of the film strongly in opposition to all of the golf courses featured, but it’s important to consider how balanced a story we are being told – we also briefly hear from some people in Scotland who are happy that Trump has arrived to build an extension of his empire, but we don’t really hear why they think that, we are not given access to their insights on the matter. Similarly in the interview with the man himself, Trump repeatedly says the director will probably edit whatever he says in his favour, and no doubt in response to this the interview plays out in a fairly uninterrupted manner – but the same cannot be said of all the other interviews in the film.
Overall though, I think this is a well balanced, passionate and eye opening documentary, and the few areas of uncertainty are ironed over by numerous clips of real reactions to Baxter’s probing questions, as well as copious interviews with the people most affected by the issues at hand and a mind toward the politics of each situation as well, all edited and paced with enough skill that the audience’s appetites are kept suitably wetted throughout, for a subject that initially sounds a little too dry to be especially engaging.
Rating : 70/100 118 Min
A modern horror film that has not only a story but … acting as well! No one could have been more surprised than The Red Dragon by this, indeed it’s quite an interesting plot despite being littered with various tropes of the genre – lots of sustained flash light scenes in dark places, exorcism and little girls with music boxes (I mean seriously, who in their right mind would buy a child one of those – here you go my dear, this will practically ensure you will one day be enslaved by a demon who will give you your first sexual experience, or at the very least you’ll have regular nightmares for the next ten years). Eric Bana plays an NYPD cop who, along with his partner Joel McHale, must investigate several mysterious and violent events in the city, all of which lead back to a tour of duty in the Middle East for three ex-military personnel, and their discovery of some ancient ruins ….
Part of the reason for the grounded structure of this is that it’s actually based on the 2001 novel ‘Beware the Night’ by none other than the officer Bana is playing, Ralph Sarchie, who gave up fighting a life of crime to fight against another type of evil, becoming a demonologist (not a dermatologist, as Wikipedia currently suggests) after tutelage and inspiration from father Mendoza, here played by Édgar Ramírez (who has played not only Simon Bolivar and Carlos the Jackal, but was of course the lucky duck who gets it on with Keira Knightley in ‘Domino’ 05). So all of the events in the film are purportedly real from that perspective, but director and scriptwriter Scott Derrickson does a very good job of creating tension and has the right tempo for the story, although it should have been trimmed by maybe fifteen to twenty minutes as the overall length and that of some of the scenes starts to undermine the otherwise taught atmosphere.
There are quite a few throwaway aspects to the narrative too, such as the police connecting events they don’t yet have the information on to be able to do and references to the music of The Doors which seem somewhat spurious. Possibly Derrickson is just a fan, and ultimately the good acting and story make it easy not to mind these faults, especially if you also happen to like The Doors. For some reason, when they are trying to force a demon in possession of a body to reveal its name I could have sworn it replied ‘Jimmy’ (imagine, ‘Hey you, Jimmy! Get oot ya fanny!!’) which would have been awesome, and there are more than a couple of moments when the film is knowingly poking fun at itself to slightly lighten the tone. Worth going to see if you are a fan of the genre.
Rating : 70/100 83 Min
Following up on the financial, if not critical, success of Planes, the Disney machine have realised they have a new potential franchise on their hands and have put more effort into this one – resulting in a much better story than before, though it’s still released by DisneyToon Studios who are relatively new at producing theatrical films and not straight to DVD sequels. Again aimed at a young family audience, parents might nevertheless find it quite enjoyable, despite being lighter on the occasional subterfuge of adult comedy compared to most of Disney’s output. The graphics are top notch as one would expect, but probably its biggest boon is the introduction of some solid voice acting from the likes of Ed Harris and Wes Studi, and a screenplay that deviates, thankfully, from regurgitating another race related contrivance and instead sees primary hero Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) effectively disabled at the beginning, forcing him to consider a change of career.
The somewhat antiquated fire department at his local airport provides him with the inspiration he needs to come to terms with his injury (his gearbox can’t handle really high speeds and conks out) as the popular terminal faces being shut down unless they can upgrade it, and thus he enlists for fire and rescue training (crop dusters were actually some of the first planes modified and used for fire fighting in the 1950s) introducing a raft of new characters, predominantly more interesting ones than in the original, and a new primary location. It’s a polished and morally strong animation for kids, with occasional moments of unexpected class, like the rescue team talking about how thunder and lightning can start forest fires as they are summoned to put one out, and then AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ playing as we watch them do just that, slightly à la ‘Iron Man 2’ (10) – although Marvel are actually owned by Disney, and indeed what is alluded to right at the end of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ also manages to sneak its way into a scene here …. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 88 | https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-gambler-a-most-violent-year-review/ | en | » Risking Business: Why See a Remake of ‘The Gambler’ When There Is a Better Version in ‘A Most Violent Year’? | [
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/espn-grantland/img/grantland-logo@2x.png ",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/espn-grantland/img/hollywood-prospectus-header.png",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/gambler-hp-e1420571454262.jpg?w=1200",
"https://grantland.com/wp-content/uploads/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Wesley Morris"
] | 2015-01-06T15:37:34-05:00 | en | https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-gambler-a-most-violent-year-review/ | Mark Wahlberg’s grown so much in the last 15 years that you forget his limitations. He still can’t show you what’s happening inside a character. He needs dialogue. He needs somewhere to run. The Gambler gives him both, but they’re both terrible. The dialogue never leaves the surface and the running across Los Angeles that happens in the last sequence is supposed to thrill you, but it’s such a cliché that your embarrassment extends to the crew member who has to follow with the camera as Wahlberg chugs along. Wahlberg plays a casino rat named Jim Bennett. Jim owes more than a quarter of a million dollars to an assortment of dangerous men – including the owner of an underground gambling operation (Alvin Ing) and the two loan sharks (Michael K. Williams plays one; a very good, very hairless John Goodman the other) whom he asks, separately, to bail him out.
Standing at a blackjack table, Wahlberg looks the part. He narrows his brow and slings his eyes around the room – at the security cameras, at the dealer, at the security guys in the distance – growing cockier whenever things go his way. This is a film about addiction, and Wahlberg has to split the difference between the kick of turning $10,000 into $80k and the kick in the gut of turning that into nothing. But anytime Wahlberg has to walk a fine line here, to sketch out some interior world, he can seem just sleepy. The character’s sunglasses — indoors, outdoors — are the equivalent of the actor asking to be graded on a curve.
The movie is a remake of a 1974 film with James Caan at the height of his runty, virile stardom. James Toback wrote the script and tricked it out with all kinds of era-appropriate psychotherapeutic ponderousness. He was working loosely off of Dostoyevsky’s novel, but with a slaggy, grad student kind of narcissism. The reason the original sort of works (it’s not very good) is that director Karel Reisz has no personal stake in the drama’s outcome. He does enough with Toback’s wanking so that “masturbatory indulgence” isn’t the first term that comes to mind. He lets some naturalism come through but also some chaos and suspense and magnetism from Caan, whose acting, in the 1970s and early 1980s, seemed to come entirely from his genitals. Burt Reynolds, by comparison, was cocky insinuation. Caan was all cock.
I don’t know why you would want to remake Reisz’s movie. But Toback’s gassy delusions have a hold on the sort of macho-minded movie people who also want to be taken seriously as intellectual studs. The name of the Hollywood legend Irwin Winkler appears on both as a producer, so there’s that too. Still: Even in Winkler’s part of town, Hollywood is out of smart ideas. The French director Jacques Audiard turned Toback’s 1977 “gangster plays concert piano” drama, Fingers, with Harvey Keitel, into The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The Paris setting made the preposterousness more palatable and less defensive. Toback’s writing always seems to be at war with itself. He was always out to prove that going to Harvard doesn’t make you a pussy – unless it does.
William Monahan, who did the script for The Departed, an adaptation of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, also adapted this one. All the personal class tension is gone from this new version, which was directed by Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). It has nothing to prove, is several years too late for the televised poker boom of a couple of years ago, and has no way of getting you to care about Jim. Everything about the movie is off. The camera keeps pointing to obvious information, lest we miss something. I’d rather be lost than have a movie hold my hand through every irrational flare-up, as though addiction makes more sense on a leash. The ending of the ’74 version, with Caan pursuing a death wish at a Harlem whorehouse, is as appalling as it is sick. But it was something.
The new movie keeps the central tension of the 1974 version: Jim is also a literature professor and novelist. In ’74, it was a silly way to nod to Dostoyevsky’s thin influence. Here, it’s a preposterous pretension that that’s meant to be a crowning irony. In the big lecture hall, the camera dances among the students and then pans up and reveals Jim ready to teach. But what’s the class really about? Wahlberg sits on his desk at the bottom of the class, then proceeds to stalk into the seats, going on (and on) about the provenance of Shakespeare’s work.
The sequence is meant to establish two things: that Jim has (or once had) something to offer and squandered it, and that the waitress we see in an early casino scene happens to be the best writer in the course. She’s played by Brie Larson, whose best scene comes toward the start, when she slowly pops her eyes at the sight of Wahlberg walking into a room to gamble. This is the sort of character who becomes worth living for even though the movie gives her no reason to feel that way. But, boy, if Jim doesn’t waste an entire class putting down the other students in order to build her up. At some point, Jim lays into a star basketball player (Anthony Kelley) for paying more attention to his smartphone than to Jim’s lectures. But as far as I can tell, whoever he’s texting has more to say.
Wahlberg rushes through the speeches in these scenes like someone walking on hot coals. When you find out that Andre Braugher is playing the department head, you think, There’s an actor who can turn this water into wine. This is a movie that could have gotten away with its mediocre ambitions with the right star. But as good as Wahlberg can be, he’s wrong for bottoming out. You need to sense a self-revulsion or fear or a high, anything but Wahlberg’s lackadaisical approach. Wahlberg just seems petulant. There’s no stress to the performance, probably because there’s no stress to the movie (Monahan keeps the original movie’s thrown basketball game, and the stakes for it feel ever lower here). Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon and even Ben Affleck don’t mind looking desperate. Wahlberg puts off a kind of thuggy smugness that’s too cool for suffering. Only when Jessica Lange shows up as his tortured gorgon of a mother does his recessive character makes sense. She doesn’t leave any air in the room. Lange applies psychology to her work, sometimes too much. But she’s the only person who has been permitted to demonstrate any natural instincts, to do any thinking at all.
♦♦♦
Before The Door Pictures
If you see only one new movie about a short, handsome man running all over a city desperate for money, don’t make it The Gambler. Both that movie and A Most Violent Year operate, at least partially, under the influence of the 1970s filmmaking and thinking, in different ways, about how to make (and unmake) it in America. J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year speaks more clearly to all the ideas of struggle and propriety and the inexorability of corruption. Chandor really has a grasp for big themes and knows why, aside from certain imperatives of ego, he’s made his movie.
It’s set in 1981, and it watches as a Latino businessman named Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) tries to corner the market on New York City’s heating-oil wars. That’s as unsexy as it sounds. But as Abel (it’s pronounced “AH-bell”) pushes entrepreneurship into empire, Chandor matches the outward expansion with gorgeous Hollywood-style classicism that is rather sexy. One of Abel’s competitors keeps holding up his trucks and stealing the oil. The film opens with the first of two good suspenseful set pieces involving one of the drivers, poor Julian (Elyes Gabel), under attack by a pair of goons. These are broad-daylight sequences, and the editing by Ron Patane, and smooth, patient photography by the officially ingenious Bradford Young, gives the scenes a sideways kind of tension. In the medium close-ups and long shots, you’re searching for trouble.
Abel needs the heists to stop. He’s trying to close a deal on a major piece of waterfront property and needs the bank to continue to back his loan. But his drivers are spooked, and they’re telling their teamster boss (Peter Gerety) that they need protection when they drive. No, Abel, says. It’ll lead to warfare, and a death would be placed at his feet. The film’s central tension is moral. Abel fancies himself above the scare tactics of the hoodlums his competitors fraternize with. He maintains so many delusions about the degrees of corruption and gangsterism required for certain kinds of business that he’s blind to his own company’s crimes. Abel and his attorney (Albert Brooks, his hair looking very William Hurt) turn to the district attorney (David Oyelowo) for help, but the DA warns them that he’s days away from charging the company — Standard Heating Oil — with all kinds of tax evasion and fraud.
Yes, it seems Abel’s got Sidney Lumet–level urban chaos on his hands. But Chandor is also thinking about the Shakespearean origami of The Godfather films. To that end, he has refolded Kay Corleone’s relationship to Michael. Now she’s Lady Macbeth. Jessica Chastain plays Mrs. Morales, a steely, chic Brooklyn blonde named Anna. Abel purchased Standard from her father, who, we come to understand, is a person to be feared. So, too, apparently, is she. We never see her use the kitchen because she’s busy cooking the books. When intruders violate the sanctity of their new modernist fortress in the woods and Abel gives chase with a bat in tow, that proves inadequate for her. He won’t arm himself, so she does, and when a ride home from a business dinner culminates with a crash, it’s she who blasts away at the deer they’ve hit.
The echoes of Corleone and Macbeth might be a bit much, but they’re entertaining. Anna only pops up here and there, often with some kind of schemed-up surprise in store. So Chastain is free to make the cliché as hard and ruthless as she possibly can without tipping over into caricature. She can protect herself and the Morales family’s three daughters, but she leaves that to her man because, in 1981, it is still the custom. She’ll maintain the ruse: “Dirty” Harry Callahan disguised as disco-era Debbie Harry.
With a movie like this, you need an actor who can maintain a fearsome center of gravity amid the stars shooting off in his midst. Isaac does it. He withstands Chastain; the excellent Gabel; Alessandro Nivola, who plays an oil rival with about three excellent scenes; and Annie Funke as the least likely of oil dons. Isaac has become the sort of actor who really might be able to do anything. Much of it goes beyond pure technique, though he’s strong in that department too. Isaac just has an uncanny ability to adjust the volume on his acting, often so that you forget that’s what he’s doing. As Abel, he wears great suits and coats. His gray hair has been given height and body. He’s not a big man. He’s as small as Caan and Wahlberg and Al Pacino, whom he most evokes here. And like Pacino at his young finest, Isaac, who’s 35, knows how to make himself seem much bigger than he is. It isn’t that you have to fear Abel. You have to respect him. He has to seem capable of both decency and criminality. Isaac conflates the two in a way that gives Abel considerable power. This is best performance Pacino didn’t give in the 1980s.
If only the movie were doing more than diagramming the rise of a tycoon. Chandor gives a film about business some intriguing racial undergirding, with Abel desperate to maintain the appearance of class, of being upstanding, probably because he presumes no one expects that of him. Assimilation is inevitable. Decorum is a weapon. The light Hispanic accent Isaac gives to the character contrasts with the more pronounced accent of Gabel’s Julian, an immigrant who desperately wants to stop driving and start making sales. But when Julian asks to do so, he’s in the worst physical condition, banged up and on crutches after the accident. The assumption is that he’s too battered to makes house calls. As the film builds into a divergent tale of luck and ambition and aptitude, you realize that Julian is just too foreign and too brown to convince white people to change their heating supplier.
The movie runs just over two hours, and Chandor keeps the movie almost antiseptically tight. He’s proving to be a smart director whose skill is growing astronomically in three movies (he’s gone from Margin Call to All Is Lost to this in four years). If he were an athlete, I’d have my suspicions about the source of that strength. But at the movies, you’re grateful to have him. He respects an audience enough to assume they’ll stay with him, and he’s a fluid enough storyteller that you very much want to keep up. But right now, especially here, his classicism is too clean. He doesn’t pass up an opportunity to remind you that the film is a tale about America (the haunting closing-credits number by Alex Ebert is called “American”), like Godfather or Scarface. He can be didactic in that way, returning to a theme as though he’s participating in an oral exam. The movie is missing the risk of making Julian, say, the Cain to Isaac’s Abel, of giving over a third of the movie to flesh him out. It’s a John Cazale part that probably needs Cazale’s writing. If Chandor’s going to play with these ideas of temptation, disillusionment, and betrayal, he should give the movie the biblical scope it needs for greatness. He’s more than sound as a thinking director. He’s vital. But he leaves you yearning for something bigger, hotter. What he could use more of is soul. | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 71 | https://loveinanotherlanguage.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/the-gambler/ | en | The Gambler | [
"https://loveinanotherlanguage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/cropped-images-rose-1.jpg",
"https://loveinanotherlanguage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/gambler.jpg?w=660",
"https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/19cafc04dccc729ca2996add14fd867f471cdf604c978cf8f0fd5afb601ce386?s=48&d=identicon&r=G",
... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2017-02-25T00:00:00 | I did not watch this 2014 movie earlier because I have no interest in anything remotely resembling gambling but I just found out that Mark Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, an associate professor in English at an university, so I caved in and watched the whole movie last night. Just as I expected, I didn't understand… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Goldenager | https://loveinanotherlanguage.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/the-gambler/ | I did not watch this 2014 movie earlier because I have no interest in anything remotely resembling gambling but I just found out that Mark Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, an associate professor in English at an university, so I caved in and watched the whole movie last night.
Just as I expected, I didn’t understand a thing about the cards (poker?) and other games played at a gambling establishment and found all those scenes boring. I was shocked that an English lecturer (teaching Shakespeare and the modern novel) could use four-letter “F” words, words like “bro” (when addressing students), comments like s*** and b***s*** liberally in class or just leave abruptly in the middle of a lecture.
I understand that the mood is dark and the protagonist here is not supposed to be likeable. Jim leads a secret double life as a high-stakes gambler and borrows money from a gangster which leaves him, his mother Roberta (Jessica Lange) and student Amy Phillips (Brie Larson) in mortal danger. He is punished and tortured, which is what, I felt, he deserves.
I did not appreciate the way the screeplay (based on a 1974 film) was presented; and I did not understand the use of the twenty-odd songs in the movie, although I enjoyed those I’m familiar with, like Sunny (by Bobby Hebb), I Get A Kick Out Of You (by Cole Porter) and Etude Op 10 No 3 (by Chopin).
I have never been more disappointed by Mark Wahlberg. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 26 | https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-gambler-255575/ | en | 'The Gambler' Movie Review | [
"https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035310&c4=&cv=3.9&cj=1",
"https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-rollingstone-2022/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif",
"https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-rollingstone-2022/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif",
"https://www.rol... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Peter Travers"
] | 2014-12-30T13:52:00+00:00 | Mark Wahlberg plays the hand he's been dealt in this so-so remake of the 1974 James Caan drama 'The Gambler.' | en | Rolling Stone | https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-gambler-255575/ | Place your bets, ladies and gents: Will this update of 1974’s The Gambler, in which James Caan played a college prof addicted to the turn of the card and the role of the dice, equal or surpass the original? Don’t get your hopes up.
But it’s not for lack of trying. Mark Wahlberg brings a fierce energy to the role of compulsive gambler Jim Bennett that almost gets you over the rough spots. What this remake lacks is the hypnotic pull of the first version, directed by Karel Reisz from an autobiographical script by first-timer James Toback that bristled with swaggering wit and philosophical gamesmanship. The new version is directed by Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) from a script by William Monahan, who wrote The Departed — a film that won Wahlberg an Oscar nomination for the way he spewed out its tough-talking dialogue.
Trending
The fit of actor and role is not so smooth here. You can feel the strain as the story switches locales from New York to Los Angeles where Jim teaches a college class on the modern novel and castigates his students for not being able to recognize genius even when they read it. One exception is Amy Phillips (Brie Larson), a pupil who knows her stuff and also knows that her prof spends his nights losing his shirt at blackjack at the Korean-run casino where she works. Jim has led a privileged life thanks to his mother (the reliably superb Jessica Lange). But after his fed-up mom bails Jim out to the tune of the $240,000 he owes casino owner Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing), our boy is back at tables. He also makes the major mistake of borrowing money from loan shark Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams) and later from Frank (a funny-scary John Goodman), a lender for whom a pound of flesh is insufficient payback. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 5 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:142-0116918-6390643:H3G5T9C924D6V8G4BNSZ$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DH3G5T9C924D6V8G4BNSZ:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjIzODE3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUwNzYwMzE@._V1_QL75_UX190_CR0,8,190,281_.jpg",
"https://m.media-amazon.... | [] | [] | [
"Reviews",
"Showtimes",
"DVDs",
"Photos",
"User Ratings",
"Synopsis",
"Trailers",
"Credits"
] | null | [] | 2015-01-15T00:00:00 | The Gambler: Directed by Rupert Wyatt. With Mark Wahlberg, George Kennedy, Griffin Cleveland, Jessica Lange. Literature professor and gambler Jim Bennett's debt causes him to borrow money from his mother and a loan shark. Further complicating his situation, is his relationship with one of his students. Will Bennett risk his life for a second chance? | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/ | Jim Bennett: I've been up two and a half million dollars.
Frank: What you got on you?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: What you put away?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on any social level. Did your grandfather take risks?
Jim Bennett: Yes. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 10 | https://expectingtochange.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/the-gambler-analysis-part-1-intro-and-opening-scene/ | en | The Gambler Analysis – Part 1: Intro and Opening Scene | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/a6fc86b89743e4ca476e0a5cc1a58758d37f8d4763ca9a5060b5cfe6bcda4ba9?s=200&ts=1723809901 | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/a6fc86b89743e4ca476e0a5cc1a58758d37f8d4763ca9a5060b5cfe6bcda4ba9?s=200&ts=1723809901 | [
"https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/2a270c52c479b5b9cb83810e3bde7a03e547383f8bf925cb634abd8350b22a86?s=24&d=identicon&r=G",
"https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/a6fc86b89743e4ca476e0a5cc1a58758d37f8d4763ca9a5060b5cfe6bcda4ba9?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://secure.gravata... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-07-19T00:00:00 | The Gambler is the most well-made bad movie I have seen thus far. What exactly does that mean though? In this statement, there are two main aspects, both of which must be looked at individually. In doing so, hopefully you will have a better understanding of what I mean exactly. It’s needless to say, but… | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/a6fc86b89743e4ca476e0a5cc1a58758d37f8d4763ca9a5060b5cfe6bcda4ba9?s=32 | expectingtochange | https://expectingtochange.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/the-gambler-analysis-part-1-intro-and-opening-scene/ | The Gambler is the most well-made bad movie I have seen thus far. What exactly does that mean though? In this statement, there are two main aspects, both of which must be looked at individually. In doing so, hopefully you will have a better understanding of what I mean exactly. It’s needless to say, but this analysis does contain spoilers.
We’ll begin by asking what causes a movie to be well-made? It should be noted a well-made film does not necessarily mean the movie itself will be good. (Obviously, that’s kind of why I have to explain it.) There are many components which go into making a film, and when they are done well, typically the movie ends up being good. However, it is when one or more them fall short, that line to goodness fails to be crossed.
What exactly are these components? In no particular order they are- the directing, the acting, the cinematography, the music, the plot, the writing, the editing, and usually the choice of actor as well. If you want to know why we don’t have many masterpieces in film, it’s because it is extremely difficult to get every single one of those elements correct.
Of course no movie will ever get everything exactly perfect, but a few have gotten very close. One example is the 2008 film, The Dark Knight, by Christopher Nolan. It is easily regarded as the best super hero movie to have come out, and it is one of the best movies of the last few decades.
Take a look at this scene from the movie. Right after Harvey Dent falsely confesses to being the Batman, he is arrested and is being escorted away. During this, in an attempt to bring out the real Batman, the Joker attacks! The real Batman then comes to the scene to protect Gotham’s white night.
First off, this scene alone had more plot than the entirety of The Gambler. Second off, it order to understand why this scene works well (and in turn the entire movie) we have to break it down.
First, the dialogue. Not much at all is said through these four minutes. There’s the officer at the beginning talking to the trucker, the other officer making the realization of the obstruction, Harvey making sure he’s safe and his escort reassuring him, the driver’s partner says a few cheesy lines and then the Joker mutters off a few lines as well. Even then, the dialogue says a lot about the characters. If you’ve never seen the film before, the Joker’s line, “Scuse me, I wanna drive.” Is enough to show you what type of person he is. Not many movies can say that about their own characters. It also serves to show how dialogue, especially in movies, is not needed to drive the plot forward.
With minimal dialogue, the acting is still really good. When the garbage truck shows up, you can see the scared reaction of the cop and it feels genuine. No one is supposed to be down there with them, yet here’s a truck ramming into his back and soon taking him off the road. Again Heath Ledger has small mannerisms including a curious ‘hmm’ when the real Batman appears, and even the workers at the end look worried and confused when the Batmobile (aka the Tumbler) comes crashing over the wall. (Though I find it interesting how only the noise of the Batmobile crashing caught their attention, and not any of the other commotion which was going on.) Every person in this scene made it feel like it was really happening.
It goes even further because the editing is also very well done. No matter what, you can always tell exactly what is going on in this scene. You may not know the meaning of what is happening, but there is no shaky-cam, or quick cut editing. Everything is presented in a way that is easy to see.
When the Joker is shooting at the armored van, we see him take the shots, the reaction of the drivers, and then the perspective from inside the armored van where the bullets are hitting. When he switched weapons the same exact sequence takes place, with an added shot of the garbage truck ramming the armored van forward.
But something else can also be seen here. The Joker’s power. He’s not the one driving the vehicle, someone else is. He’s not the one loading the guns, someone else is. He shoots, and when the bullets are gone, someone else is handing him a gun ready to go. There are at least four or five other henchmen with him, and though never said, they’re all doing exactly what he says and needs.
Then comes the cinematography. The scene starts with a low nighttime shot of the convoy coming towards the screen, and it pulls back following the lead car as if we were barely in front of it. We get a few quick shots of Harvey and his escort exchanging concerned glances before cutting to an overhead view showing the entire convoy, including the police helicopter overhead. We see the cars turn and cut to another low angle shot of the semi truck.
Through a few quick cuts we then see the driver from the perspective of the officer, and the officer from the perspective of the driver, then bam! Surprise! It’s the Joker! We don’t see the officer die, even though we know he did. We then cut back to overhead view of the convoy as it slowly moves forward. This pan reveals the burning fire truck (irony, but also message sending) at the top of the screen.
Tell me that’s not a beautiful shot. All that takes place in the first thirty seconds of the scene, and it sets the mood perfectly. If I were to analyze the entire scene, we’d be here for a quite a while. Basically, everything is shown in a really cool way. The small details like showing the driver from below signifying the officer’s point of view, those are simple tricks which really add to the movie. It subtly shows the Joker in power as he’s the higher figure. Most of his shots are from above while the shots showing the other characters are all at even level.
Finally, so we’re not here all day, the music. Watch this scene again and try to focus on the music. You’ll notice it slowly builds when the convoy makes the first turn, increases when the Joker is revealed, and then cuts completely once the garbage truck enters the scene. As soon as the Joker’s attack begins, there is no music and the scene is allowed to speak for itself. I’m willing to bet you didn’t notice that the first time around. A lot of movies make the mistake of thinking music adds to a scene, when sometimes it would have been better off without it. Fortunately this film uses music near perfectly throughout. So when I say music is important, I don’t just mean the music itself, I also mean the choices made of when to play it and when not to play it.
All these elements combined made for an amazing 8 minutes sequence (As the linked video is only half of the entire scene) in the Dark Knight, and it continues throughout the entire film. You forget you’re watching a movie and feel like you’re watching actually events take place. That’s why the Dark Knight is a well-made good film, because the pieces come together and they work. The immersion this film brings is the key to any movie. Small mistakes can really take you out of the film, so when that doesn’t happen, you tend to have a good movie on your hands.
What about a movie that’s not well-made? What about a truly bad film? When I say a film is bad, I am not talking about a movie I didn’t enjoy. For instance you may have not liked The Dark Knight, but that doesn’t stop it from being a masterpiece of our time. I am talking about a film which I think is truly a bad movie, one that has no redeeming factors outside of laughing at it. In this case, M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s The Last Airbender.
Fortunately I don’t need to go into a whole analysis as to why this film is bad. If you really want to see a full analysis, there are several available on YouTube. To show you why this film is bad, I only need to share this twenty second scene. For a better understanding of what’s going on, you must know in this film’s universe, people can control the four elements. Each element has a nation of its own and the Fire Nation has started a war with the rest of the world. Here, we see Earth Kingdom prisoners fighting back against the firebenders.
Ok, really quick. These are Earth Kingdom prisoners. These are people who can control the earth and the rock in the world. You know, that stuff which is COMPLETELY surrounding them in the prison. It’s literally all around them. Moving on…
In order to control (bend) an element, there are martial art styled moves required to make it happen. This is because the bending techniques are taken from real world martial arts styles. So those two men at the beginning of the scene aren’t just flailing around, they’re actually trying to firebend. The scene then cuts over to 5 men seemingly practicing a haka only to see a tiny pebble float across the screen.
Why does this scene not work? First off, the choreography is absolutely terrible. It doesn’t look like these men are controlling the elements, it just looks like they’re dancing, and badly at that. After seeing the five men finish their dance routine, we see that small rock come across the screen. Problem is, they aren’t the ones moving that small rock. In fact we don’t actually get to see what they moved. Supposedly they made the wall that stopped the fire from hitting their friends at the beginning, but even that doesn’t make sense from what we see. (Why would their routine need to continue after the wall has been made?)
The acting in the film is actually worse than the dance routines. Here’s a short example of what I mean, and yes, this scene was actually released in the movie. By the way, no, this film is not meant to be a comedy. There are certainly much longer videos showing the extent of the acting, but I’d rather not waste your time. It’s pretty clear these kids can’t act, and it’s well known they weren’t chosen for their acting. When you combine that with a poor director and weak plot, you have a film ready for disaster. (And what a disaster it was.)
Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what causes a movie to be well-made, and how when those same aspects fail, the movie can end up being terrible. So how does all that apply to The Gambler? Let’s start by taking a look at what this film promised to be in its trailer. Of course like any movie, there was more than one trailer, but for this instance I am using the only one I personally saw.
The trailer begins with our main character Jim and his mother, played by Mark Wahlberg and Jessica Lange respectively, as they are at a bank asking to withdraw $260,000 in cash. The tone is immediately set when the cashier asks if everything is alright and the mother responds with, “When someone needs that amount of money in cash, nothing’s ok.”
The trailer then cuts to the shot of a casino as we see Mark Wahlberg win again and again at blackjack, but his luck run outs when he switches to roulette and loses everything. Over this we hear a narration from John Goodman saying how he’s seen Mark be up half a million dollars. He’s then corrected as Mark say’s he been up two and half million dollars. The music kicks in and we see a couple quick shots, including one not shown in the movie at all.
And then this is where the trailer really lies to us. We see Mark in his classroom which is followed with a quick cut over to Brie Larson’s character, Amy. Mark says the line, “If you take away nothing else from class, desiring a thing cannot make you have it.” Get it? Because it’s interlaced with pictures of Brie Larson indicating that he wants her, but can’t have her. Funny thing, that’s not how the line goes and the real line is fairly significant to the film. Obviously a trailer should never give everything away, however by cutting the trailer in this way, it made me believe the film would have a much heavier romantic evidence than it did.
A few more quick shots and more narration setting up Mark’s predicament, a false subplot is set up and then the music cuts out as John Goodman says a line made for the trailer. They make it seem like Mark gets in a lot of trouble and to continue to make it seem like he and Brie Larson will have a romantic relationship, and then it hits us with the line, “When you get a second chance…” This is followed with Mark saying a line he will repeat many times throughout the film, “What if I told you I’m not a gambler?”
The end of the sentence comes up, “…A risk is worth taking.” Because get it? Gambling is a high risk game. The trailer then ends by showing Mark return one last time to gamble and hopefully solve all his problems.
This is the type of movie where you can already guess how it will end. The suspense and entertainment comes in getting to that point. You already know he’s going to be ok and get the girl at the same time, but it’s a matter of seeing how it all goes down.
The problem with this trailer is it sets up a completely different movie. Line’s like “Whatever did happen to dad?” are completely useless as the father does not exist, and outside of that single line, nothing involving him ever happens. It’s a silly question Mark says in an insulting way to his mother and nothing more.
Furthermore, the romantic plot line is almost non-existent, an entire subplot is left out of the trailer (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it sets up important plot points), and it fails completely to show how arrogant and uncaring Mark really is.
-Quick side note, I will be calling the actors by their names and NOT by their character names. The reason for this is simply because the character names aren’t really used in the film. Jim is said one time, and Amy only during one scene, but even then she’s referred to by her last name. In fact, the only character whose name we really know is the one Anthony Keller plays, Lamar. Even one of the most important characters in the film is simply known as ‘The Korean.’ (Though his name is used a few times early on) For that reason I will continue to call the actors by their real names-
Since the trailer does not adequately portray what happens in this film, what does actually take place in The Gambler? The movie begins with thirty-six seconds of logos, including Paramount and some company called ‘Closest to the hole/Leverage entertainment’. Not sure who this group was, I decided to try and figure that out in order to see what else they have worked on. However, there were only two relevant pages of information available. The first being the IMDb page showing the company is heavily affiliated with Mark Wahlberg, and the second showing Mark Wahlberg is actually in charge of the company. In fact they’ve only ever been involved with two other films, both which also starred Marky Mark.
What’s interesting though is this company doesn’t seem to actually exist. While I was trying to see what else they had worked on, I came across the show Boardwalk Empire. On their Wikipedia page it shows Closest to the Hole as a production company, yet when you click on the link to Closest in the Hole, it only sends you to Mark Wahlberg’s page. Wahlberg’s page has no information about Closest to the Hole. In other words, Mark Wahlberg is the company. I guess this really shouldn’t be surprising though. Just look at the cover to the bluray. Mark Wahlberg’s name is barely smaller than the movie title, it is the first thing you see, and it’s put in such a place it makes it seem like it is part of the movie title. ‘Mark Wahlberg: The Gambler.’ In a sense it’s true.
Now that we know who funded the film, what about those who got it to that point? Who wrote this thing? Credit for the screenplay is given to William Monahan, most well known for writing the screenplays to movies like The Departed, Kingdom of Heaven, and Body of Lies. Even though The Departed has received positive reviews, the other two are sitting comfortably at about 6.5/10 each. The Gambler, when averaging the scores, does a little bit worse sitting at 5.8/10. He’s never really worked on anything too significant or any movie with a rating of 8 or higher.
(Super quick, films rating 6-7/10 are usually considered average/good, while films 8 or higher are considered great)
So we have someone who writes screenplays, but isn’t necessarily the best at doing so. (And oh boy does that explain a lot!) However, he’s not the only accredited writer. Alongside him we have James Toback who to my surprise, wrote the original version of The Gambler. Yup, that means the 2014 movie starring Mark Wahlberg, is actually a remake of a 1974 movie by the same name starring James Caan. Who can? James Caan!
From what I can tell there aren’t too many differences in the two films. The two movies follow the same basic plot, down to the subplot left out of the trailer and the biggest difference comes from there being no love story in the original. The names are different and the amount owed is too. (Even with inflation the $44,000 dollars in Caan’s version would only be $216,000 today.) For the most part, it’s basically the same film.
Knowing this film is a remake only makes Monahan’s work worse. The original is not a bad movie. In fact, it actually has a higher rating than the remake. Even though that’s common amongst most remakes, it’s safe to say not many people have heard of the original in this case. All Monahan needed to do was take the original screenplay and modernize it and in many ways he did. Thanks to him instead of Axel and Hips, we now have Jim and Amy. However his modernization doesn’t go much further.
You know what the biggest difference in the two films is? The plot in the original is simple. In the original, Axel Freed is an English professor and an author, who also happens to have a gambling addiction. At school he inspires his students and outside the classroom he has the admiration of his family, including his mother. When she finds out he owes $44,000, she gives it to him. Axel then goes to Vegas and gambles it, making a small fortune, however, he loses it all.
Axel’s only way to lose the debt is to convince one of students, who happens to be a basketball star, into accepting a bribe into not winning the game by more than a certain number of points. (Meaning he would have to win the game by 7 or less points. Or he could just lose the game.) The plan carries out, Axel leaves and gets into a fight with a pimp and the film ends as he studies himself in a mirror and smiles enigmatically at the blood coming from the wound.
In the remake, most of that is still there. Jim is still an English professor and a writer who likes to gamble. At one point in the film he does receive money from his mom – as shown in the trailer – and he does lose it all as well. The basketball game bet also plays a crucial role and that’s the end of the similarities.
Jim is not inspirational in the classroom. I don’t think the filmmakers were trying to make him be as the way he speaks to his students is more harsh than it is anything else. This film starts with him already owing money, having the money, and then losing it. He then takes out a loan from a loan shark, and in order to settle that debt, the basketball bet takes place. But since he still owes money to the first, he has to take out a third loan from yet another person. Because remember, the money his mom gave him was all lost. I this version it is clear the mom does not admire him, nor does it seem anyone does. Anyways. After taking out this other loan he goes to the casino, and bets it all on roulette. (Seriously Monahan, all you had to do was modernize it!)
This film is much more complicated and unnecessarily so. I did not even include any of the other interactions with the mother, nor the romantic relationship attempting to take place throughout. There’s a not-so-subtle, subtle idea shown and with everything jumbled together, it’s hard to understand at points. So let’s finally see why!
As the logos play, we hear the sound of a roulette wheel spinning, shortly followed by a quiet, yet audible, ticking noise. The shot fades into Mark Wahlberg sitting alone on a chair and crying. A single tear drops down his face and we soon find out it’s because he’s in the hospital, and someone close to him is dying. Here, ten seconds in, we actually see a little bit of cleverness.
‘See’ isn’t quite the right word in this case. ‘Hear’ would be the better choice. I’ll admit, when I saw the film for the first time, I did not catch this. It was partly due to not caring for the opening logos, and partly because of how the scene plays out. With the movie called The Gambler and the sound of dice being rolled, I didn’t put much thought into the ticking sound, even as the scene transitioned to show the old man on his death bed. After watching it again, I realized the sound was the ticking of a clock.
We don’t ever actually see a clock in this entire scene. It’s only Mark and (As we later learn) his grandfather. That slight ticking sound in the background just serves as a way to add tension. It reminds you of time as you watch someone who has just run out of it.
The grandfather acknowledges he is going to die and asks what Mark thinks about it. Mark replies with ‘I’m going to miss you.’ I honestly cannot tell if this is meant to be a genuine response or not. The way the line is delivered makes it seem like he’s saying it to say it. However, just moments ago he was crying and choking up, showing he really does care.
The grandfather doesn’t like the response. He says he won’t know about Mark missing him, which is a good point, and instead wants to know what Mark is worth when left nothing. Mark yet again gives a response in a way which makes it seem like he just wants to get it all over with. Yes his grandfather is dying, but he’s not showing sadness in these scenes. He just doesn’t seem to care. We later learn his character is like this in general, but I still find it odd he would continue such a persona when the person closest to him is dying.
It could easily just be bad acting. Mark Wahlberg certainly has had his moments. (Of course the whole movie is terrible) I just don’t think that is the case. Wahlberg’s acting in the rest of the film is pretty decent so I truly believe he just kept the same persona for this scene. It just doesn’t work. He didn’t forge the tears, he’s not pretending to cry, yet the way he is speaking makes it seem like he doesn’t really care.
The grandfather tells Mark ‘You are me know, if you’ll have it” Which Mark nods and seemingly accepts to. The music swells to a sad song as the grandfather has now passed and we see many people at his funeral. The opening credits play, more so, the opening credit plays as only Mark Wahlberg’s name is shown. At the funeral Mark and his mother exchange a quick glance before he simply walks out. This is only seems to reassure my belief that he really didn’t care. His face his blank at the funeral, he seems bored. As soon as his mother sees him, he just walks out.
And then what happens? The music changes to an upbeat song, and THE GAMBLER flashes on the screen. I guess we weren’t supposed to care about the grandfather after all. We follow a car driving down the road at night as the rest of the opening credits begin to play. It’s actually a bit unclear when exactly this takes place. I’m going to assume it happens right after the funeral though.
Is it me or does Mark Wahlberg really seem…full of himself?
This film was produced by him, and written by those who have worked with him before, and of course he’s the star. Since he’s the star, it makes sense for him to get first billing. However, I have never seen it where the star’s credit is separated from the rest. I’ve never seen opening credits be separated at all. Yet Mark Wahlberg wanted to have himself be all alone, to make it stand out. When you see it, you read it, and though you’re expecting more, they don’t come. So you remember it. No one ever remembers the opening credits. No one ever pays attention to them because there isn’t really a point to. Knowing this, Wahlberg put himself alone to stand out.
As Mark is driving he continuously looks down at his phone which is shown to be broadcasting a basketball game. The effects here aren’t that good. It’s quite obvious the video was added in later, and it shows. For one, the quality is way too high. He’s obviously not using wifi, yet the picture is perfect and with no delay whatsoever. Also, there’s no ambient light from the phone. Again, this scene takes place at night. We see the light from the streetlamps passing by, but there’s no ambient light from the phone. It’s as if a wall was placed around it.
To further show what kind of character Mark is playing, he doesn’t use his turn signal, he’s speeding, and he’s weaving in and out of traffic. Am I supposed to like this guy? He’s our main character, the guy we’re going to follow throughout the entire film. Yet, in the first two minutes we have him seemingly not caring about his grandfather’s death, and then being an idiot on the road.
For a few more seconds we continue to follow him as he drives somewhere. He pulls up somewhere and parks the car, and suddenly the music stops. We cut inside the car to see Mark has an absolutely uncaring look on his face. It might be a look of dread, but it really seems like he could not be bothered by anything right now.
I always find it interesting when the music in a film is the music the characters are hearing. A film which does this beautifully is my all-time favorite film, Another Earth. Several times throughout the film, we as the audience will be hearing music that the characters are listening to on the radio or through some other means of doing so. I believe this scene perfectly captures the entire movie, and it does so in a single minute. Even the narration in the scene is from a radio broadcast taking place. Incredibly well made film I’ll analyze another time.
The Gambler also does this a few times, like in the scene I just talked about. For this scene, I don’t think it works though. I understand what they were trying to do, but at least to me, it failed. To go from the sad music at the funeral, to Mark carelessly driving while listening to an upbeat song is such a change, it caught me off guard. Obviously they are attempting to capture Mark’s character, but as I already do not like him, this really doesn’t help.
The film continues as we see Mark carrying a briefcase into a building. He’s scanned for weapons, and as he exchanges money for chips, we realize he’s at a casino. He walks in, and what’s this? Brie Larson works here? She gives him a surprised look, clearly not expecting to have seen him there, but he says nothing and moves on. Of course we know from the trailer the two already know each other, but this is meant to just give a hint as to who she is. We don’t know Brie’s character yet or what involvement she has in the plot. All we know is this woman somehow knows Mark, and happens to work at the place he went gambling.
The music slowly starts to build, giving a good amount of tension as Mark goes further and further into the casino. He walks up to a blackjack table and puts down $10,000. The music quiets a bit, still trying to keep the tension. Mark wins the first hand. He doubles his bet. The music builds again. Mark wings again. He gives a quick look to the camera as he puts down $40,000. Brie Larson watches on. The music continues to grow. He’s at 15, and stays. He wins again. The music is now speeding up.
Mark demands to go again at $40,000, but the dealer is hesitant, causing Mark to repeat himself a bit more forcefully. He has 14, he hits, and he goes over. He throws down the $40,000 from the last hand and demands it be doubled. $80,000. The dealer again looks hesitant, and glances over to his side. Mark tries to stay in control, claiming the dealer must be new as he knows ‘Mr. Lee’ covers a lot more than that. The dealer glances over to a watcher who approves doubling the money.
$80,000. We see Mark is being watched and the game begins again. He’s at 9, and hits. An Ace comes out, and the dealer gets blackjack. Mark loses everything. The music stops, and the tension is gone. We see him drink alone at a bar, and here we are introduced to a new character, Neville, played by Michael Kenneth Williams.
He tells Mark he hopes he paid his rent, and Mark replies saying he doesn’t pay rent. Of course he could be lying, but someone who just lost $120,000 probably doesn’t have to. Neville asks Mark if he has some sort of problem. Mark semi-jokingly insults the man’s hat, and a quick glance over shows us Neville has bodyguards. Mark gets up to leave, and Neville makes sure they’ll talk again soon, but as Mark is walking away he asks if Neville is a gambler?
“Not like you.” Very interesting for a few reasons. We learn Neville is not only powerful, but smart with his money. It also sets up the line Wahlberg repeats. “I’m not a gambler.”
We then cut to Brie Larson looking over at Mark, and Neville joins him again. They make a bet where Mark wagers $ 5,000, but Neville puts up $10,000. They do acknowledge how this is uneven, but Mark decides to go through with it anyways. They pull out a deck of cards, lay down the money, and Neville pulls up a Kind of Spades. Mark laughs and thinks it is some kind of joke, Neville says, “I thought you wanted my business card.”
Not gonna lie, I have no idea what this means. I think the game was simple. Each player picked a card and whoever had the highest card won. Aces would be low, kings high. Spades are usually seen as the ‘best’ suite, so the King of Spades would be the best card. Automatic loss for Mark. No idea what the business card thing meant though. All that really happens in this scene is Neville offers Mark a stake, or basically a loan.
Mark seems to say no and Neville walks away. Then though, we see Mark head up some stairs into a heavily monitored and guarded room. Mr. Lee is in here, watching TV. Here, he points out the problem with this entire opening scene.
“You came in with $10,000 in cash and you didn’t give it to me?” Wait. Mark owed Mister Lee the money. The very money he had on him. The very money he had on him as he went into the place Mister Lee lives, and he didn’t give it to him? Surely not even someone as idiotic as Mark would do that stupid? Right?
“Well this is a gambling establishment.” Oh dear… I understand if he were to have given the money, we wouldn’t have a movie, but when logic fails, I cannot ignore it. (Not to mention the original still exists and it didn’t do this!)
Every movie will have its own set of rules. Every movie will require you to suspend some disbelief. It happens. You can’t go into a Star Wars movie and say it’s unrealistic, of course it is! But it’s a movie based in a universe where the force exists, and there are entire armies of droids and whatnot. So when you see a ship flying in space, it makes sense. It superhero movies, you have to except super powers exist. The Gambler is set in the real world. It should follow real world rules.
So when the entire premise of the film is based around Mark Wahlberg needing to payback money, then you cannot have him walk into the place he needs to go with the money he needs to have, and be stupid enough to lose it. Not only that, but then the movie proceeds to setup/show Mark getting TWO more loans of money.
He enters the scene owing money, he leaves the scene owing money, what was the point? To establish characters? Brie Larson is completely useless in this scene. She and Mark never actually say anything to each other at all. It’s just to show they somehow know each other, and considering that, they could have just kept her as the student and it would be the same.
So obviously it is to setup Mister Lee and Neville. Ok, that’s fine, we need to know who they are somehow. So why then the stupidity? They could have this same exact scene play out, with one minor difference, and it would be much better. The $10,000 he walked in with no longer belongs to Mister Lee. It’s just $10,000 he had. Out of money, he now gets approached by a loan shark, but he knows Mister Lee. So he goes up and asks him for money. That money, is then the money this movie should be based around.
In a way it is, along with the original $10,000 now. This scene only made me like Mark even less. He was uncaring when his grandfather dies, drives like an idiot, and now he is an idiot. Not only for losing the money, but because he had $40,000 on him. We soon learn he owes a lot more than that, so I can understand the want to get more money. After losing the $40,000 the first time though, he should have stopped, given Mister Lee a good cut of it, and kept some to try again another day. But nope, he lost it all because remember, ‘he’s not a gambler.’
Mark then asks if he’s ever not paid Mister Lee, which the answer is obviously yes, as Mister Lee tells him he owes $240,000 and he wants it in seven days. There’s where the plot to the movie kicks in. Again, even after this, I still find the gambling scene a little useless. For the average person $10,000 is still a lot of money. Of course $240,000 is a lot more, but at that point the number itself really doesn’t matter much. The point is, Mark owes a lot of money.
So don’t have the amount be $240,000. Keep my version of the scene as I wrote it above. Mark goes to Mister Lee, asks for $10,000 and Mister Lee gives it to him. Some time passes and Mister Lee wants his money back, giving Mark 7 days to do. There, everything that just happened, but simplified down a bit to make a little more sense.
That’s the first 10 minutes of this film. Obviously there are more parts to come, but this seems like a good place to stop for the moment. | ||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 47 | https://www.pokertube.com/article/movie-review-james-caan-s-the-gambler | en | 📰 Movie Review: James Caan’s The Gambler | [
"https://www.pokertube.com/assets/svg/icon/plus.svg",
"https://www.pokertube.com/assets/svg/logo-alt.svg",
"https://www.pokertube.com/assets/svg/icon/menu-mobile.svg",
"https://www.pokertube.com/assets/svg/icon/lightning.svg",
"https://www.pokertube.com/assets/svg/icon/pacman.svg",
"https://www.pokertube.... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-LdRzkWrDM"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jon Pill"
] | 2017-04-23T08:03:16+00:00 | James Caan plays a university professor, Axel Freed, teaching English by day, and gambling it all by night. | en | PokerTube | https://www.pokertube.com/article/movie-review-james-caan-s-the-gambler | 08:03
23 Apr
When I reviewed 2014’s The Gambler it roused my curiosity about the original. The film had the bleak and philosophical tone of Russian novel wrapped up in the pelt of a slick crime caper. And Mark Wahlberg’s binge of self-destruction was thoroughly enjoyable in a somewhat rubbernecking kind of way.
So I didn’t go into to the 1974 original blind. I had the remake on my mind and was aware of its cult status. It seemed like poor form not to go back and do something of a side by side on them together. My suspicion is that I watched them in the right order. The remake is less hard edged than the original, but it does fix some of the problems and benefits from forty years of technological advances in camera, sound and editing.
It was much harder to like the darker, nastier tone of James Toback’s script for the original. Harder, but worth it.
Death Wishes
So, James Caan plays a university professor, Axel Freed, teaching English by day, and gambling it all by night. The plot largely concerns his shenanigans as he tries by turns to pay back his debts, and to lose every penny he already owes. The debts are owed to suitably dangerous people to dangerous people and incurred throughout the movie at roulette, blackjack, and a series of disastrous college basketball games.
As well as James Toback’s script, we have Karel Reicz on as director, and James Caan starring in the Marky Mark role, alongside the perfectly tolerable performances of Lauren Hutton, Carl Crudup and a brief appearance from a very young James Woods.
Prickly and Bleak
Overall the film works. Caan’s performance is excellent as a character that is even more prickly and unlikeable than Wahlberg’s. He abuses his girlfriend emotionally and intimidates her physically and ends up in a satisfying and slightly grotesque sort of way, far darker than expected even for a film that rags on about death wishes and sticky ends.
From the get go, the director Karel Reisz makes sure you know this is not the romantic world of The Cincinnati Kid or the comedic world of California Split – he leads strong out of the gate: the fifth word of the script is ‘cunt’ at a time when the censors were just beginning to cope with the grubbiness of post-sixties cinema.
It’s in the world of gambler as an archetypical addict on a nineteenth century will to power trip. This is not the reality for most people who have done serious time at the tables, and very few of us have the over-literary lens of Axel Freed to gaze through, but the gambling montages when they come are fun to watch and the sense of desperate addiction coming off the very exposed decolette of Mr Caan is pretty compelling.
I would recommend, but perhaps not as strongly as I would the remake. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 7 | https://halifaxbloggers.ca/flawintheiris/2015/01/the-gambler-1974-and-2014-review-the-rare-improved-reboot/ | en | The Gambler (1974 and 2014) reviews — The rare improved remake | [
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/logo_mobile_off.png",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_menu.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_search.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/button_history.svg",
"https://cdn.halifaxbloggers.ca/images/social_facebook.png",
"https:/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"flawintheiris"
] | 2015-01-04T06:27:29+00:00 | Two movies 40 years apart, with the new deal seeing the winning card on the river | en | /favicon.ico | Flaw in the Iris | https://halifaxbloggers.ca/flawintheiris/2015/01/the-gambler-1974-and-2014-review-the-rare-improved-reboot/ | The Gambler (1974)
Directed by Karel Reisz, written by James Toback
The Gambler (2014)
Directed by Rupert Wyatt, written by William Monahan from the screenplay by James Toback
Having seen the new version starring Mark Wahlberg, I went back to screen the original film for comparison. I’m a fan of 1970s American thrillers in general, but was surprised to find the newer movie shinier and more complex than the original, the rare case where the remake, 40 years later, is better.
Not that The Gambler of 1974 isn’t worth seeing, but as a feature drama, this is standard, five-card no-draw material.
The immortal James Caan is Axel Freed, a New York professor from a Jewish family where grandad came from the old country to become a self-made millionaire and mom is a doctor. Axel has a few problems with finances: He can’t seem to afford buttons on his shirts above the xiphoid process and owes $44,000 to a number of bad men, including 1970s heavies Paul Sorvino, Burt Young, and Vic Tayback. These aren’t unreasonable dudes, but they want their money.
Axel’s days are spent trying to explain the vagaries of desire to unengaged students in his college English class, including a young basketball talent. Otherwise he’s out driving around town in a convertible Mustang or hanging with Lauren Hutton, who doesn’t do much here but play observer to his compulsions. Also look for M. Emmett Walsh and James Woods in small roles.
A portrait of a confident man, but one hobbled by his disease, the film is a rote cautionary tale and a fairly predictable family drama, which totally goes off the rails late in the running when Axel runs afoul of Antonio Fargas’ pimp.
In the newer film, Mark Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett is a far more interesting central presence. He’s also a college prof and author, but very much a Los Angeles creature in his M3 Beemer. This isn’t a man with a gambling problem, he’s nurturing a beef with life itself. He actively loathes his job and his class of students studying the modern novel—including the perpetually distracted basketball star (Anthony Kelley)—railing against their mediocrity in lecture halls while celebrating a single student for her writing talent—Amy, played by a luminous Brie Larson. Amy also happens to also work at the casino Jim frequents.
Like Axel, Jim owes a lot of money. With inflation it’s up over 200 grand. His bad men are Alvin Ing, Michael Kenneth Williams, and especially John Goodman, whose half-naked bath house appearance, head-shaving, and monologue about how America was built on “fuck you” will be haunting my nightmares. If there’s a single reason to see the movie, it’s Goodman at his powers’ peak.
There’s also a vaguely oedipal relationship between Jim and his mother, Roberta (Jessica Lange). In this version Jim’s grandfather dies early on, and the gambling debt serves as a catalyst for a final schism between Jim and his family. These people are nouveau-riche California WASPs, and that might be partly why Jim hates himself so much.
That’s maybe The Gambler‘s biggest problem—we never really get to the source of Jim’s existential angst, though we hear it aired repeatedly in long-winded speeches. And Wahlberg isn’t entirely convincing as an academic—any more than Caan was—but he does manage a wiry, nihilistic charisma.
Fortunately, the film gathers all kinds of momentum as the deadline to pay back the debt approaches—the plot expires over a week following Jim’s efforts to secure the cash he owes. Director Wyatt delivers enough stylistic flourishes leading into a final act of sweat-staining suspense, tightening up the narrative excesses.
In conclusion, The Gambler may not amount to more than a break even, but it’s a hand worth playing. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 21 | https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movies/the-gambler-2014.html | en | THE GAMBLER (2014) - Movieguide | [
"https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1078982112261039&ev=PageView&noscript=1",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/movieguide-logo.png",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/movieguide-logo@2x.png",
"https://cdn.movieguide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gambler.jpg",
"https:/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Review"
] | 2014-12-17T01:09:37+00:00 | Is THE GAMBLER (2014) family friendly? Find out only at Movieguide. The Family and Christian Guide to Movie Reviews and Entertainment News. | en | Movieguide | The Family Guide to Movies & Entertainment | https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movies/the-gambler-2014.html | THE GAMBLER is a remake of the 1974 movie starring James Caan about an associate professor of English with a gambling addiction who must find a way to pay off two gangsters, or else. The movie is smartly directed, with nice camerawork, acting and terrific sound that adds tremendously to this movie’s dark and intense mood. It has constant abundant foul language, however, and solves the plot problem for the protagonist with more gambling.
Mark Wahlberg stars as Associate English Professor James Bennett, who wrote a novel with middling success. After his elderly grandfather’s death, the movie shows James going into an illegal gambling establishment operating in a mansion in the Malibu Hills high above the Pacific Ocean. Though he owes the casino’s Asian owner, Mister Lee, $240,000, James promptly loses the $10,000 he brought with him, then borrows $50,000 from a black gangster, Neville, who’s apparently roaming the illegal casino looking for gamblers to stake. He gives Mister Lee $40,000 of the $50K, but gambles away the rest. Now, James still owes about $260,000 to Lee and Neville, and only has seven days to pay off the two debts.
Back at college, James tells his literature students that writing for a living is useless unless you are a true genius who’s willing to take big risks. Don’t strive for mediocrity, he advises. He tells the class that only one student, a pretty young blonde woman named Amy Phillips, qualifies as a writing genius, but he chastises her for not taking great risks. While James lectures, the star basketball player in his class, a young man named Lamar Allen, is too busy playing with his cell-phone to pay much attention. The college is putting pressure on James to help focus Lamar on passing the class so he can keep playing basketball.
After some threats from Mister Lee and Neville, James gets the money to pay off his debts from his wealthy mother, who’s not very happy with her son. However, he goes with Amy to a legal casino in Palm Springs, where he loses all the money at blackjack. After this happens, Neville threatens both Amy and his mother if James doesn’t come up with the money.
James goes to see a menacing loan shark named Frank, played by John Goodman. Frank lectures James about taking too many risks. He tells James that, if he gives him the money to pay off his gambling debts, Frank will show no mercy at all when James can’t make his weekly interest payments. Wisely, James decides not to borrow Frank’s money.
Neville finds out that Lamar Allen attends James’ class. He proposes that, to pay off his debt, James will get Lamar to win the next game by only seven points, but James has a better idea. His idea wins him the money to pay off Mister Lee, but James decides to borrow more money from both Frank and Mister Lee in a gutsy play to risk everything. The collateral for the loans will be his own life.
Rupert Wyatt, who directed RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the first movie in the recent reboot of that franchise, is a talented filmmaker. He does a bang-up job here, getting Mark Wahlberg to give one of his best performances, and doing the same with John Goodman, who plays the loan shark, and Jessica Lange, who plays the mother. The new script is based on James Toback’s acclaimed screenplay for the 1974 movie THE GAMBLER, starring James Caan of THE GODFATHER, ELF and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. The sound design in this GAMBLER is particularly powerful. It gives more gravitas to the actors’ voices, especially in the scenes between Wahlberg and Goodman and between Wahlberg and Michael Kenneth Williams (from HBO’s BOARDWALK EMPIRE), who plays Neville.
That said, THE GAMBLER has about 100 or more “f” bombs. There’s also a brief scene set in a strip club. Of course, the story involves a lot of gambling. Eventually, more gambling resolves the plot problem, and the protagonist believes that risking everything is the only way to live. Hence, the movie’s tagline, “The only way out is all in.” So, ultimately, media-wise viewers will find THE GAMBLER to be unacceptable entertainment. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 76 | https://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2014/12/the_gambler_review_mark_wahlbe.html | en | 'The Gambler' review: Mark Wahlberg can't hold 'em or fold 'em | [
"https://www.oregonlive.com/pf/resources/images/common/weather/small/02.png?d=1374",
"https://www.oregonlive.com/pf/resources/images/common/weather/small/02.png?d=1374",
"https://www.oregonlive.com/pf/resources/images/common/weather/small/02.png?d=1374",
"https://www.oregonlive.com/pf/resources/images/oregonl... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Jeff Baker | The Oregonian/OregonLive",
"Jeff Baker",
"The Oregonian"
] | 2014-12-25T18:00:00+00:00 | Wahlberg plays a compulsive gambler in a remake of a 1974 movie starring James Caan. | en | /pf/resources/images/oregonlive/favicon.ico?d=1374 | oregonlive | https://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2014/12/the_gambler_review_mark_wahlbe.html | The Gambler
Would you take a class on the modern novel from this man?
(Paramount Pictures)
Mark Wahlberg doesn't know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
Wahlberg's remake of the 1974 classic "The Gambler" is meant to be a breakout, a meaty role that showcases his strengths as a dramatic actor, but it comes off as more of a vanity project that exposes his limits. It's slick and moves quickly through the overworld/underworld of a rich compulsive gambler without getting anywhere the depths to which it aspires. And hey, the music is great and those sunglasses Wahlberg wears are really cool.
Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, a hip L.A. cat with an amazing haircut who leads a double life: during the day, he's the world's most pretentious English professor. At night, he's the world's most reckless gambler. Old Double-or-Nothing, they call him at the high-stakes games run by Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing) in empty mansions at the beach and behind the kitchens of Korean restaurants. He's also, as someone helpfully points out, "the grandson of the 17th-richest man in California," an alienated rich kid who runs headlong toward trouble.
The death of his grandfather sends Jim on a gambling bender, and he goes straight from the service into deep-down debt, first with Mr. Lee and then Neville Baraka, who loans him $50,000 ("plus 20 points") that he promptly loses. This becomes a pattern, borrowing from his mother (Jessica Lange, fierce and fabulous) and yet another gangster, Frank (John Goodman, respledent as a pasha in a steamroom), and blowing the money before paying it back. It's almost as he has a death wish, or, as he helpfully explains, "Life's a losing proposition. Might as well get it over with."
A countdown begins, superimposed in big numbers on the screen. Jim has seven days to pay Mr. Lee, and seems to have no interest in doing so. (He has enough money, in cash, and goes to a casino and starts playing $10,000 hands of blackjack. Lucky Jim.) He starts a romance with one of his students and tries to get another, a basketball star, to fix a game. No boundaries for Professor Wahlberg!
Wahlberg's best quality has always been his ability to project a quiet authority, street toughness in the service of greater good, whatever it might be. In "The Gambler," that translates into blank looks and bitter wisecracks. He's hurting inside, and he doesn't care how he goes down. We get that, but it doesn't feel like there's anything at stake or much going on behind his eyes when he does bother to take his shades off.
Wahlberg is also a generous actor who can be part of a scene without dominating it. He was superb in the all-star team that was "The Departed" and allowed Christian Bale to upstage him all the way to an Oscar on his passion project, "The Fighter." In "The Gambler" he does marvelous work with Lange, Goodman and Williams but flounders in his classroom scenes, flopping on a table or jumping on a desk while browbeating his dumbstruck students about Shakespeare and Camus.
The script is by William Monahan, an Oscar winner for "The Departed," and it's from the All Criminals are Nietzschean Philosophers School of Screenwriting. Wahlberg can't have a simple conversation with Goodman -- "you owe me some money/I'll pay you on Friday" -- without everyone getting all pseudo-profound. Wyatt, the director of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," keeps the pace up and shows some nice touches with underwater imagery. He also had a major hand in the soundtrack, needle-dropping Dinah Washington and Bob Dylan at surprising moments.
The 1974 version of "The Gambler" starred James Caan and was written by James Toback, who used his experiences as a New York literature professor and gambling addict. Toback taught Dostoevsky and took a little of the Russian master's "The Gambler" for his own. Wahlberg's "The Gambler" is California Lite.
"The Gambler"
Grade: B-minus
Rating: R
Running time: 111 minutes
Playing at: Opens Dec. 24 for evening previews; Dec. 25 everywhere.
Cast and crew: Mark Wahlberg, Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, John Goodman, Michael Kenneth Williams, Alvin Ing, Richard Schiff, Dominick Lombardozzi; written by William Monahan; directed by Rupert Wyatt.
The lowdown: Wahlberg plays a compulsive gambler in a remake of a 1974 classic starring James Caan and stays at surface level, cool and composed.
-- Jeff Baker | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 37 | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1008080-gambler | en | Rotten Tomatoes | [
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://images.fandango.com/cms/assets/97c33f00-313f-11ee-9aaf-6762c75465cf--newsletter.png",
"https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/rtlogo.9b892cff3fd.png",
"https://resizing.flixster.com/cn6dl4Eg... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | New York City English professor Axel Freed (James Caan) outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him. After a heavy loss betting on basketball, he relies on his mother to bail him out to the tune of $44,000. Unfazed, he continues to gamble recklessly, winning big at a casino, only to blow it all just as quickly. When his debts become more than he can handle, the loan sharks begin to circle. | en | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/assets/pizza-pie/images/favicon.ico | Rotten Tomatoes | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1008080-gambler | Let's keep in touch!
>
Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:
Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More
Sign me up No thanks | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 0 | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gambler-2014 | en | The Gambler movie review & film summary (2014) | [
"http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6324575&cv=2.0&cj=1",
"https://www.rogerebert.com/assets/logo/rogerebert-fea9f2c27bcb671adfb84f275757a289ffd85f5370aeffb12f481bf5a3241543.svg",
"https://www.rogerebert.com/assets/logo/rogerebert-fea9f2c27bcb671adfb84f275757a289ffd85f5370aeffb12f481bf5a3241543.svg",
"h... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Odie Henderson"
] | null | Dopey parable about risk-taker is a sucker bet that benefits from three wicked supporting turns by John Goodman, Michael K. Williams and Alvin Ing. The lead character craps out big time. | en | /assets/fav/apple-touch-icon-57x57-9e12b6d6d15bfb3e86f09c3fc7d58a6f8a2d808cb856df9c1ada23480cda1dae.png | https://www.rogerebert.com/ | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gambler-2014 | This retooling of the 1974 James Caan film is completely devoid of the grit, nastiness and desperation of the Karel Reisz-James Toback original. Caan’s character was memorable because one sensed that his film might do something awful to him, or worse, that his character might self-destruct and harm himself. By comparison, the 2014 version never indicates that it will maim and/or kill risk-taker Jim Bennett. It’s too in love with his cocky, unflappable arrogance in the face of danger. No matter how dire the situation, Bennett’s escape is never in doubt. This format works well for action movies and superhero yarns; not so much for dramas.
“The Gambler” refuses to acknowledge that Bennett has a gambling addiction. It tries justifying Bennett’s actions by tying them to the existential works he teaches in his college literature class. In that class is Amy (Brie Larson, so great in “Short Term 12”), whose character description sounds like it fell out of a filing cabinet at New World Pictures: College student by day, cocktail waitress in illegal gambling den by night. She knows of Bennett’s reckless abandon with other people’s money at the casino run by Mister Lee (Ing), and I guess it turns her on or something. It’s as good an interpretation of her character as any, because Larson is given less to play here than she got in “Don Jon”.
As Bennett digs deeper holes for himself, every confrontation between him and another character plays like a “very special episode” of an 80’s sitcom. People rant and rave at Bennett, calling him on the carpet for numerous offenses and mistakes as a means of teaching him a valuable lesson. Sometimes they rough him up a bit for emphasis. Then they completely forget about teaching lessons and bend to his will. Jessica Lange, as Bennett’s super-rich Mom, slaps him around when he asks her for the $240,000 he needs to clean up his latest mess. Lange’s over-the-top chastising scene would shame Joan Crawford, but she goes to the bank to get Bennett the money anyway.
Scenes like this occur with the aforementioned trio of Ing, Goodman and Williams, but they know how to toy with screenwriter William Monahan’s preposterous, purple macho prose and posturing. They play the material at odd angles while Wahlberg plays it so straight he’s upstaged at every turn. In these mini-movies, they become the stars and the lead becomes an extra. As Mister Lee, Ing delivers his lines in a smooth, ice cold fashion that’s fun to watch. Goodman plays his entire role topless, and turns the F-word into poetry. Most effective of the trio is Williams, whose Neville serves as a charming mentor to Bennett without losing the “dangerous Black man” edge that Toback’s earlier films liked to fetishize.
Bennett borrows money from each of them, and since he’s originally indebted to Lee’s casino, Lee’s loans are akin to borrowing from Peter to pay Peter. Every so often, one of the three shows up to inquire about their money, and they’re always one step ahead of Bennett. Each knows when he has borrowed from the other, as if a “Bennett Alert” popped up on their phones prior to the scene. What I would have given for scenes where Ing, Goodman and Williams sat around exchanging information and laughing maniacally about how they can’t hurt Bennett too badly lest they upset the audience. This movie should be about them.
Since the plot hinges on whether Bennett can successfully juggle all his schemes and make his big score pay off, it isn’t unreasonable to ask that “The Gambler” get one’s heart racing. But director Rupert Wyatt is too busy trying to be arty and daring with his visuals and soundtrack juxtapositions to think about pacing. In one unwise sequence, Dinah Washington’s classic “This Bitter Earth” plays over extraneous footage of writhing, naked strippers, leaving one to ask “just how bitter IS the earth in the Champagne Room?” In another, Bennett runs what appears to be a marathon, only to arrive at a destination the movie wrongly assumes is bittersweet.
Look, I get it. This is supposed to be some kind of fable-slash-parable. But even the wimpiest fairy tales have some form of credible threat. When various minions finally do pummel Bennett for his sins, I thought “eh, he’ll be all right.” And he was. Where’s the drama in that? | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 40 | https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/71499/how-much-money-was-the-last-bet | en | How much money was the last bet? | [
"https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/movies/Img/logo.svg?v=d1e3edb04666",
"https://i.sstatic.net/s6Dic.jpg?s=64",
"https://i.sstatic.net/9THYE.png",
"https://i.sstatic.net/psFRV.png",
"https://i.sstatic.net/Nfh9N.jpg",
"https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/a007be5a61f6aa8f3e85ae2fc18dd66e?s=64&d=identicon&r=PG",
"... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2017-04-10T12:22:01 | In The Gambler Jim Bennett places a huge amount on black:
The amount seems to be more money than he owed if he won, but he leaves declaring he is not a gambler and | en | https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/movies/Img/favicon.ico?v=74d8f37ba4ec | Movies & TV Stack Exchange | https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/71499/how-much-money-was-the-last-bet | His final bet was 400 000$ and there are two ways to look into it.
First it is not said in the movie or written in script how much he bet at the final scene on Roulette. But we can see from the picture the amount of money, bills and currency straps placed on Roulette table.
These are common movie prop-money. Yellow currency straps represents stacks of 10 000$ of 100$ bills. The other currency straps seems to be more brownish (50% bill) than red (5$ bill) strap. Also the back of brownish strap bill seems to be more of 50$ than 5$ bill, so the stack represents 5000$. We can see that there are 38 yellow currency straps and 4 brown straps - that totals to 400 000$.
From movie perspective we can calculate his final bet by working his debt and bets backwards. His full debt before the final bet was 636 000$. He owed to Frank 286 000$ (260 000 + 10% per week)₁ and to Mister Lee 350 000$. Now the problem is, that we do not know what was the exact bet at Roulette wheel, because we do not know how much he won from betting at Lamar´s game₂. But we learn at the end of movie that Frank offered Jim 100 000$ that was "little extra on the top for him", that Jim declined₃.
We know that Roulette (red or black) bet ratio is 2:1 and all Jim´s loans were paid off with at least 100 000$ on top (736 000$), the initial bet must have been at least 368 000$ to achieve it. It is never said in the movie if Mister Lee also took interest on money, but it would be wrong to assume that he would loan it for free. So from calculations I would assume either the remaining 64 000$ (800 000$ - 736 000$) was interest or "little extra" for Mister Lee.
₁ When he first approached Frank it was stated that rate is 10% per week.
₂ He paid lamar 150 000$ (second loan from Mister Lee) for throwing a game by not winning more than 8 points. 260 000$ (loan from Frank) was betted at Lamars game by Jim, but we did not learn how much he actually won.
₃ The 100 000$ extra money, that Jim leaves for Mister Lee and Frank on Roulette table may not be intentional, because previous to final bet he offered 50 000$ to Dexter for making a trip to Vegas and placing a bet on Lamar's game, but Dexter declined it. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 17 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/reviews | en | The Gambler (2014) | [
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:139-5671765-5603266:TKNCF8AKRNJ5P9SNCATG$uedata=s:%2Frd%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DTKNCF8AKRNJ5P9SNCATG:0",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjIzODE3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzUwNzYwMzE@._V1_UX67_CR0,0,67,98_AL_.jpg",
"https://m.media-amazon.com/image... | [] | [] | [
"Reviews",
"Showtimes",
"DVDs",
"Photos",
"User Ratings",
"Synopsis",
"Trailers",
"Credits"
] | null | [] | null | The Gambler (2014) on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more... | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/reviews | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 8 | https://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/film-review-the-gambler-1201353148/ | en | Film Review: ‘The Gambler’ | [
"https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035310&c4=&cv=3.9&cj=1",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety-2020/assets/build/svg/brand-logo.svg",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/the-gambler-mark-wahlberg.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1",
"https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Justin Chang"
] | 2014-11-11T08:00:44+00:00 | There’s enough macho swagger for three pictures but barely enough soul to sustain even one in Rupert Wyatt’s gambling drama. | en | Variety | https://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/film-review-the-gambler-1201353148/ | There’s enough swaggering cynicism for three pictures but barely enough soul to sustain even one in Rupert Wyatt’s “The Gambler,” a stylish, energetic but disappointingly glib remake of Karel Reisz’s still-potent 1974 drama of the same title. Mark Wahlberg tears into one of his meatiest roles as an English professor drowning in a sea of blackjack debts and self-destructive impulses, a born risk-taker who’s aptly described as everything from “the kind of guy that likes to lose” to “the world’s stupidest asshole.” But it’s that surfeit of macho attitude in William Monahan’s script that keeps Wahlberg from coming anywhere near James Caan’s sly brilliance in the earlier film, making this a movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core. In a roll of the awards-season dice, Paramount is launching “The Gambler” Dec. 19 with a one-week Oscar-qualifying run before its Jan. 2 wide release, when the collective draw of Wahlberg and a juicy supporting cast should yield solid if not hefty B.O. payouts.
Released just a month after “California Split,” Robert Altman’s more idiosyncratic take on the pleasures and perils of going all in, Reisz’s original “Gambler” marked the heavily autobiographical screenwriting debut of James Toback, who initially objected when Paramount announced plans for a remake without his knowledge. (The scribe has since given the project his blessing and received an exec producer credit, while original producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff retain those credits here.) In its broad narrative outlines if not its jazzier sense of style, the remake remains largely faithful to Toback’s self-probing study of a Harvard-educated New York academic who finds himself increasingly at the mercy of his gambling addiction, alienating his nearest and dearest while seeking to evade and outwit all the bookies and collectors on his tail.
Popular on Variety
In this Los Angeles-set retelling, Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, a cynical motormouth who spends most of his evenings at the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of a Korean-run establishment, where he’s racked up enough debt that the casino’s tolerant owner, Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing), can no longer turn a blind eye. Learning that he has one week to pay back $240,000 or face grievous consequences, Bennett makes his situation immediately worse by accepting $50,000 from a beret-wearing loan shark named Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams), establishing a pattern of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and squandering every bailout that comes his way. On more than one occasion, Bennett approaches big-time lender Frank (a superb, bald-pated John Goodman), who warns him not to make the mistake of appropriating his services, lest he find himself forced to pay the ultimate price.
Bennett’s compulsion springs at least partly from his privileged upbringing, and he reacts with more contempt than gratitude when his acerbic mother, Roberta (Jessica Lange), coughs up the requisite quarter-million in cash, though she warns him that it’s the last time she’ll come to his rescue. But a solution that easy would scarcely satisfy the story’s dramatic requirements, much less Bennett himself, who seems hooked on more than just the possibility of winning big. What excites him is the far more dangerous thrill of pushing himself to the limits and potentially losing everything, so that he can rely on his wits and sheer dumb luck to pull himself back from the brink. When a concerned croupier balks at dealing him another hand, telling him it’s for his own good, Bennett fires back: “You don’t come here for the fucking protection.”
By day, Bennett (sort of) teaches a college class on the modern novel, which mainly consists of bashing the know-nothings and burnouts who call themselves his students, using Shakespeare and Camus to pound home the idea that only a few lucky geniuses are able to rise above mediocrity in their chosen field. One such exception is Amy Phillips (Brie Larson), a quietly brilliant literature student and part-time casino employee who knows about her professor’s double life (shades of “Half Nelson”), which naturally leads them to the next level of inappropriate intimacy. But Amy isn’t the only pupil who will figure into Bennett’s escape plan: The others are Dexter (Emory Cohen), a state tennis champ, and Lamar (Anthony Kelley), a GPA-challenged basketball star who might be just what Bennett needs to dig himself out of his latest hole.
Virtually without exception, the dialogue in “The Gambler” is pitched at a level of caustic, hyper-articulate, testosterone-fueled bluster that swiftly announces itself as Monahan’s handiwork. In that respect, the script proves a sturdy fit for Wahlberg, who may be no viewer’s idea of a professorial type, but who knows how to toss off Monahan’s profane zingers with aplomb, as he did in his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Departed.” Here, playing a guy so bored with his coddled, complacent existence that he can only feel alive by risking everything, Wahlberg proves no less ferociously eloquent — too eloquent, frankly, to the point where you wish that Bennett would spend less time sounding off about what an empty shell he’s become, and more time simply being.
There are a few attempts to underline the notion that this guy is sinking in own excesses, particularly in the surreal use of water imagery; in one dreamlike interlude, a bathtub (a nod to a scene in the 1974 film) briefly opens a window into his childlike soul. But in the end, “The Gambler” doesn’t seem especially interested in exploring these tortured depths. Even as a clock counts down the days to his deadline (a device that generates little in the way of suspense), Bennett doesn’t really deepen in complexity or pathos; he just gets snarkier and more self-satisfied. Given his near-total disregard for his own safety, it almost feels like a waste of energy for a viewer to root for him to survive, or to take much pleasure in the film’s softly redemptive ending; by the time Bennett finally takes a well-deserved punch from one of Mr. Lee’s thugs, you may feel less inclined to flinch than to cheer.
Neither of the two actresses is well served by the script’s awfully stunted view of women, though Lange succeeds in upping the emotional ante in her few scenes as the embittered mother, reacting to her son’s dilemma with equal parts scorn and horror. Larson, so good in last year’s “Short Term 12,” is a wonderfully poised presence here, but it’s one of the film’s more glaring failures that it gives us no real sense of Amy’s intellectual potential; the moment she falls into bed with Bennett is the moment she ceases to be a figure of interest. Williams, Ing and especially Goodman deliver uniquely pungent variations on the role of the reluctant enforcer, waxing philosophical about their methods and never resorting to physical violence unless absolutely necessary, while Richard Schiff has an amusing scene as a pawnbroker whom our hero approaches in his hour of need.
Wyatt, the accomplished helmer behind 2011’s terrific “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and the under-appreciated 2008 prison drama “The Escapist,” keeps the energy percolating at a high level throughout — mainly through a stream of arresting and unpredictable musical choices that include Chopin, Cole Porter and Bob Dylan, encompassing everything from Dinah Washington’s soulful “This Bitter Earth” to Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ haunting a cappella cover of “Creep.” (Wyatt shares the music-supervisor credits with Theo Green and Clint Bennett.) Pete Beaudreau’s editing is sharpest in the casino, where the rapid-fire blackjack games naturally heighten one’s attention; a time-lapse gambling sequence and a few tilt-shift effects further distinguish d.p. Greig Fraser’s often dark and moody visuals, which make atmospheric use of recognizable L.A. landmarks (including USC and Downtown) as well as other California locations. | |||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 3 | https://www.bustle.com/articles/53592-is-the-gambler-based-on-a-true-story-the-original-screenplay-is-autobiographical | en | Is 'The Gambler' Based On a True Story? The Original Screenplay is "Autobiographical" | [
"https://imgix.bustle.com/rehost/2016/9/13/fd591d6c-eb13-46df-a09d-c003e3bfb8d0.jpg?w=248&q=50&dpr=2",
"https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/getty/2024/8/7/b0e2a21d/canadian-us-actor-ryan.jpg?w=159&h=110&fit=crop&crop=faces&q=50&dpr=2",
"https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/getty/2024/8/1/a7ff16d6/los-angeles-ca-decemb... | [
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lel1lLlOIxA"
] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Kristie Rohwedder"
] | 2014-12-19T15:00:03+00:00 | If Mark Wahlberg and John Goodman movie The Gambler seems familiar, your instincts are correct, you cinephile, you! The Rupert Wyatt-directed drama is a remake of the 1974 film of the same name. The original was directed by Karel Reisz (The French… | en | /favicon.ico | Bustle | https://www.bustle.com/articles/53592-is-the-gambler-based-on-a-true-story-the-original-screenplay-is-autobiographical | MENU
Entertainment
Is 'The Gambler' Based On a True Story?
by Kristie Rohwedder
Dec. 19, 2014Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
If Mark Wahlberg and John Goodman movie The Gambler seems familiar, your instincts are correct, you cinephile, you! The Rupert Wyatt-directed drama is a remake of the 1974 film of the same name. The original was directed by Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman), stars James Caan, and was penned by screenwriter James Toback. In an essay he'd written for Deadline in 2011, Toback says the original Gambler screenplay is "blatantly autobiographical" and based on his real-life experiences.
In the same essay, the screenwriter shares how The Gambler (1974) screenplay came to be:
After graduating from Harvard in 1966 I taught literature and writing in a radical new program at CCNY whose additional faculty included Joseph Heller, John Hawks, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich, Mark Mirsky and Israel Horovitz. I also wrote articles and criticism for Esquire, Harpers, The Times, The Voice and other publications. Most of all, I gambled — recklessly, obsessively and secretly. It was a rich, exciting double life with heavy doses of sexual adventurism thrown in for good measure. Inspired by the life and work of my literary idol, Dostoyevsky, I embarked on the writing of The Gambler intended originally as a novel. Half way in, it became clear to me that I was seeing and hearing the “novel” as a movie and I abruptly decided to turn it into one. When I hit full stride I felt as if I were a recording secretary, simply putting down on paper dialogue and images I heard and saw as if they were not sounds and pictures at all but rather real life action existing in my brain.
The 2014 remake, which was penned by The Departed screenwriter William Monahan, follows a gambling addict named Jim Bennett (Wahlberg). Jim teaches college courses by day and toils away at the blackjack tables by night. He finds himself crushed beneath an avalanche of debt. The partition separating his two lives weakens. He attempts to "fix" his financial situation, but his actions only compound the problem. Stuff gets messy, y'all.
The Gambler (1974) is currently streaming on Netflix and The Gambler (2014) will roll into theaters Dec. 19. | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 16 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Gambler | en | The Gambler | film by Wyatt [2014] | [
"https://cdn.britannica.com/mendel/eb-logo/MendelNewThistleLogo.png",
"https://cdn.britannica.com/mendel/eb-logo/MendelNewThistleLogo.png",
"https://cdn.britannica.com/01/190901-131-2048BEEC/vector-illustration-sport-pentathlon-competition-series-Fencing.jpg?w=200&h=200&c=crop",
"https://cdn.britannica.com/35... | [] | [] | [
"The Gambler",
"encyclopedia",
"encyclopeadia",
"britannica",
"article"
] | null | [] | null | Other articles where The Gambler is discussed: John Goodman: Film career: …World War II, and in The Gambler (2014), a remake of a 1974 drama about a man with a gambling problem. Later movies included Trumbo, a biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (2015); the comedy Love the Coopers (2015); the horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016); and Patriots Day (2016),… | en | /favicon.png | Encyclopedia Britannica | https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Gambler | In John Goodman: Film career
…World War II, and in The Gambler (2014), a remake of a 1974 drama about a man with a gambling problem. Later movies included Trumbo, a biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (2015); the comedy Love the Coopers (2015); the horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016); and Patriots Day (2016),…
Read More
In Jessica Lange
The Gambler (2014) cast Lange in the role of the contemptuous, but ultimately sympathetic, mother of an English professor with a gambling problem. She later costarred with Shirley MacLaine in Wild Oats (2016), a comedy about two women who travel to the Canary Islands after…
Read More
In Brie Larson
…acted with Mark Wahlberg in The Gambler (2014) and with Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (2015) before her breakthrough in Room. In addition to an Oscar, Larson also won a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA Award for her work in the film, which was based on a 2010 novel by…
Read More
In Mark Wahlberg
…Transformers: The Last Knight (2017); The Gambler (2014), a remake of a 1974 film based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; and the comedy Daddy’s Home (2015) and its 2017 sequel.
Read More | ||||
6235 | dbpedia | 3 | 1 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(soundtrack) | en | The Gambler (soundtrack) | [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8c/The_Gambler_%28soundtrack... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Contributors to Wikimedia projects"
] | 2023-06-27T16:16:25+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gambler_(soundtrack) | 2014 soundtrack album by various artists
The Gambler (Music from the Motion Picture)Soundtrack album by
various artists
ReleasedDecember 16, 2014RecordedVarious timesGenreSoundtrackLength60:31LabelRepublicCompiler
Rupert Wyatt
Theo Green
Clint Bennett
The Gambler (Music from the Motion Picture) is the soundtrack to the 2014 film of the same name, a remake of the eponymous 1974 film. The album consisted of fifteen songs which are used in the film's narrative. It is mostly consisted of pop, rock and electronic dance music from contemporary bands such as M83, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Easy Star All-Stars and artists including Dinah Washington, Alan Price, Billy Bragg amongst others. The soundtrack was released on December 16, 2014 by Republic Records.[1]
Background
[edit]
As music had been an important role in Jim's life as a novelist, Rupert Wyatt curated a soundtrack consisted of source music to reflect Jim's attitude about genius, and the sound like how he imagined inside of Jim's head and what it might sound like. He referenced the opening lecture an example, where "Jim sets out his whole agenda and his whole philosophy on life, which is that you’re either a genius or you’re nothing" and the way the soundtrack has been chosen in the sequence, was considered as a great opportunity to "pick the greatest musical artists of our times and previous decades".[2] He called the soundtrack as an ecletic mix of music, with each in turn are "true individual, timeless songs".[3]
Track listing
[edit]
Reception
[edit]
IndieWire listed it in their "Top 15 Soundtracks of 2014" and further describing it as "Scorsese-esque" which "laced with fatalistic cool and dark irony".[4] Stephanie Merry from The Washington Post, despite reviewing the film negatively, praised its soundtrack having "full of gems".[5] Stephen Benedict Dyson of The Conversation complimented the music as "ethereal".[6] | ||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 82 | https://sites.google.com/view/download-film-god-o-pepyen2c5 | en | Download Film God Of Gambler 2 | https://ssl.gstatic.com/atari/images/public/favicon.ico | https://ssl.gstatic.com/atari/images/public/favicon.ico | [] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback, which, in turn, is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel of the same name. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title | en | https://ssl.gstatic.com/atari/images/public/favicon.ico | https://sites.google.com/view/download-film-god-o-pepyen2c5 | The Gambler is a 2014 American crime drama film directed by Rupert Wyatt. The screenplay by William Monahan is based on the 1974 film The Gambler, written by James Toback, which, in turn, is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel of the same name. The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg as the title character, premiered on November 10, 2014, at the AFI Fest,[5] and was theatrically released in the United States on December 25, 2014. It features the final film performance of George Kennedy before his death in 2016.
In August 2011, Paramount Pictures announced a remake of the 1974 film The Gambler with the original producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. Intended as a directorial project for Martin Scorsese, it was reported that Leonardo DiCaprio was attached as the star and William Monahan would write the screenplay.[6]
Download Film God Of Gambler 2
DOWNLOAD 🔥 https://urllie.com/2y9CzK 🔥
Scorsese left the project and filmmaker Todd Phillips was in talks to take over as of August 2012.[8] In September 2013, actor Mark Wahlberg and director Rupert Wyatt expressed interest in making the film.[9]
By October 17, 2013, Brie Larson was in talks to play the female lead role, alongside Wahlberg.[10] On January 15, 2014, Emory Cohen joined the cast of the film, playing one of the professor's students.[11]
Shooting began on January 20, 2014.[12] On February 3, 2014, Wahlberg was spotted on The Gambler set in Downtown Los Angeles.[13] On March 13, there was a basketball scene filmed in Los Angeles.[14]
On September 8, 2014, it was announced that Jon Brion would be scoring the music for the film,[15] while on October 27, Film Music Reporter revealed that Theo Green composed the score for the film.[16] Republic Records released a soundtrack album for the film on December 16, which features songs from various artists.[17]
The Gambler had its world premiere during the 2014 AFI Fest at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on November 10.[18] Paramount previously set the film for a limited release in the United States on December 19, 2014, for an Oscar-qualifying run strategy, and planned to expand the film on January 1, 2015.[19] But on December 5, Paramount announced the film would be released wide in cinemas on December 25, 2014, instead of the previous platform release plans.[20]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 44% based on 144 reviews, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Well-paced and reasonably entertaining in its own right, The Gambler still suffers from comparisons to the James Caan classic that inspired it."[23] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 55 out of 100, based on reviews from 40 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[24] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade C+ on scale of A to F.[25]
Bilge Ebiri of Vulture.com wrote: "Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist's dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power."[26]Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter called it a slick and efficient remake, and "In nearly every scene, Wahlberg carries off the central role with what could be called determined elan."[27]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film two out of four stars, saying: "Wyatt keeps the action coming at a fast clip, but watching Jim repeatedly pursue a path of self-destruction for reasons never made clear grows wearying."[28]
Jessica Lange's performance has received critical acclaim. TheWrap wrote that Lange had one of her "meatiest film roles in ages."[29] The Huffington Post described her performance as "ferocious" and capable of "knocking down William Monahan's profanity laced dialogue with gleeful abandon"[30] Also, the Boston Herald described her work as "strikingly memorable",[31] which Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Indiewire have agreed with, terming her "affecting", "stirring", and "terrific".[32][33][34] James Berardinelli from ReelViews described her as "heartbreaking as the cold, rich widow who blames herself on some level for her son's failure."[35] Chris Nashawaty from Entertainment Weekly lauded her acting as effortless by saying "[she] can do icy in her sleep..."[36] Rex Reed from The New York Observer described her performance as "hard" and "venomous".[37] Peter Travers described her performance as "reliably superb".[28] Jeff Baker from The Oregonian stated that her acting is "fierce".[38] Indiewire suggested Lange as a contender for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.[39]
One of the many complaints that I hear about this movie is that there aren't enough scenes of him gambling. It's called The Gambler so it logically should show a lot of gambling. But thats the thing. The whole movie is one massive gamble. It requires some rewatching and I strongly recommend attempting to actively track the money as you watch. But this isn't about money. Not even slightly. So let me clue you in to the point of this film: this is a suspense driven theatrical analysis of unparalleled genius.
I dont mean this as to say that the film itself is unparalleled genius. The film attempts to delve into the concept of being bored while being intelligent, the burden of natural talent, the depression of a lack of meaningful purpose and a test of intelligence where the wager is life itself and the payout is the nirvana of the culturally glorified individual.
After realizing that he has interest in Amy and a reignited spark for life Jim must then finish ahead of the house after he has gotten up with what he was truly gambling for. This is where the ideology if searching for genius becomes one of the most neccesary lenses to view the movie through as its at this point Jim is approached by one of the three sharks he owes money to and told to enlist the help of basketball GENIUS Lamar Allen. Jim takes out money on his life and is beaten severely for it and then we get one of the best speeches from Frank, one of my favorite characters in film ever. In this speech he talks about positions of power and the ability to truly be free, through self control and being realistic. He knows Jim cares about life now so in giving him the speech he also gives him money in an attempt to let him get out one last time. This is where the money counting becomes important. It's unknown just how much Jim had dexter bet in Vegas. There is a perfectly legitimate possibility that Jim still had some cash on him at the very end from the basketball game especially considering Dexter didn't take the 50k. So Jim not only might have beaten the house and found a purpose but also did it with the added bonus of a payout. This is speculation because it's unknown what was truly bet on the game.
Jim then runs away from the city symbolically leaving the lavish and coveted lifestyle to pursue true happiness having experienced what he was told happiness was. I think this film has gotten a bad rap because it's a literary movie with lots of theatrical elements such as monologuing and quips. I dont even have time to address everything important with how it was directed, filmed, cut. The coloring, the music, the symbolic nature of what some scenes represent on his journey to self enlightenment. It's quite unfortunate that this movie isn't appreciated more. It has quite a lot to say on the nature of being a human and what it means to be happy especially in a modern society and meeting the criteria of being its ideal image. I tend to watch this film as though I were enjoying Shakespeare. I am there for the complex ideas through fun dialogue and searching for things that are implied. This movie set out to, in a sea of over saturated spoonfed reboots, give the viewer a chance to feel intelligent. To try and beat the house and find the meaning in life.
If you're a film buff who enjoys films for the analysis and conceptualization then this film is worth a rewatch. Because it's attempting to figure out what it means to be a human when the ideal version of a human is killing you from the inside out. And it does a damn good job.
The Gambler series generated five Emmy Award nominations. Rogers made his acting debut in the original film The Gambler, which was a massive ratings hit that achieved critical success for CBS upon its original release on April 8, 1980. It was nominated for two Emmy Awards.
By popular demand, Rogers returned as Brady Hawkes in The Gambler: The Adventure Continues, which premiered in November 1983 on CBS. The film was an even bigger ratings success than the first and was nominated for an additional two Emmy Awards. The Gambler Part III: The Legend Continues followed in 1987 (also on CBS), and the Emmy-nominated fourth installment of the series, The Gambler Returns: The Luck Of The Draw, starring Rogers and Reba McEntire, aired on NBC in 1991. The series moved back to CBS for the 1994 finale, Gambler V: Playing For Keeps. The first four movies of the series were directed by Dick Lowry and the last was directed by Jack Bender.
Brady Hawkes is back in this rip-roaring sequel to The Gambler. When Brady's son Jeremiah is kidnapped by a vicious gang, the gambler and his sidekick Billy Montana saddle up to rescue him. With the aid of the quick-drawing Kat Muldoon (Linda Evans - Dynasty), the stakes couldn't be higher. Will this pair of aces with a queen kicker come out on top?
The Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) is a nonprofit cultural arts center dedicated to presenting the best of independent, documentary, and world cinema; teaching literacy for a visual culture; and making film a vibrant part of the community.
Film Movement is pleased to announce its acquisition of the first three films in the seminal RED PEONY GAMBLER series, a hallmark of the yakuza genre: RED PEONY GAMBLER (Dir. Kosaku Yamashita), RED PEONY GAMBLER 2: GAMBLER'S OBLIGATION (Dir. Norifumi Suzuki) and RED PEONY GAMBLER 3: FLOWER CARDS GAME (Dir. Tai Kato). 6190a8d2fd
3ds emulator ipa download
download replmon.exe
hindi muhavare pdf download
download passion ringtone
o corajoso ratinho despereaux download | |||
6235 | dbpedia | 2 | 4 | https://www.amazon.com/Gambler-Jessica-Lange/dp/B01MDMDE6A | en | Amazon.com | [
"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/captcha/icyrpkip/Captcha_phaxpaszxg.jpg",
"https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/oc-csi/1/OP/requestId=PXHZ29CGDBSV98AYB2V7&js=0"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | null | Enter the characters you see below
Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. | |||||||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 36 | https://wizardofvegas.com/forum/off-topic/general/21850-the-movie-the-gambler-is-awful/ | en | The movie, The Gambler... is awful. discussed in General Discussion/Off | https://wizardofvegas.com/favicon.ico | https://wizardofvegas.com/favicon.ico | [
"https://wizardofvegas.com/common/images/logo.png",
"https://wizardofvegas.com/search-results/search-icon.png",
"https://wizardofvegas.com/common/images/mobile-logo.png",
"https://wizardofvegas.com/search-results/search-icon.png",
"https://wizardofvegas.com/common/images/bg1.gif",
"https://wizardofvegas.c... | [] | [] | [
"las vegas",
"gambling",
"forum",
"discussion"
] | null | [] | null | Did anyone else see this movie? The scenes look like they were all shot in sequence, then chopped up and intentionally put together out of sequence. There... | en | /favicon.ico | https://wizardofvegas.com/forum/off-topic/general/21850-the-movie-the-gambler-is-awful/ | Quote: gordonm888
Has there ever been a good realistic gambling movie? Or, a good realistic lengthy gambling scene in a movie? I guess Rounders is the best depiction of gambling that I can remember at the moment. I thought 21 was unrealistic and disappointing as were all of The Gambler movies (1974 James Caan film and Kenny Rogers' films), Casino Royale, Maverick and 5 Card Stud. Any one have a recommendation?
Quote: Romes
As you said, Rounders. Possibly some aspects of Pool Hall Junkies too (rounders but for pool).
Also, I still am curious: What do other people think the plot was, or what Marky Mark's character was thinking the whole movie???
Quote: gordonm888
Has there ever been a good realistic gambling movie? Or, a good realistic lengthy gambling scene in a movie? I guess Rounders is the best depiction of gambling that I can remember at the moment. I thought 21 was unrealistic and disappointing as were all of The Gambler movies (1974 James Caan film and Kenny Rogers' films), Casino Royale, Maverick and 5 Card Stud. Any one have a recommendation?
Quote: gordonm888
Has there ever been a good realistic gambling movie? Or, a good realistic lengthy gambling scene in a movie? I guess Rounders is the best depiction of gambling that I can remember at the moment. I thought 21 was unrealistic and disappointing as were all of The Gambler movies (1974 James Caan film and Kenny Rogers' films), Casino Royale, Maverick and 5 Card Stud. Any one have a recommendation?
Quote: gordonm888
Has there ever been a good realistic gambling movie? Or, a good realistic lengthy gambling scene in a movie? I guess Rounders is the best depiction of gambling that I can remember at the moment. I thought 21 was unrealistic and disappointing as were all of The Gambler movies (1974 James Caan film and Kenny Rogers' films), Casino Royale, Maverick and 5 Card Stud. Any one have a recommendation?
Quote: gordonm888
Has there ever been a good realistic gambling movie? Or, a good realistic lengthy gambling scene in a movie? I guess Rounders is the best depiction of gambling that I can remember at the moment. I thought 21 was unrealistic and disappointing as were all of The Gambler movies (1974 James Caan film and Kenny Rogers' films), Casino Royale, Maverick and 5 Card Stud. Any one have a recommendation?
Quote: Ayecarumba
I have heard good things about the poker play in, "The Cincinnati Kid", but can't recall since it has been many, many years since I watched that Steve McQueen movie.
Quote: gordonm888
I saw The Cincinnati Kid a long time ago as well. I remember that the poker in it was 5-card stud. The poker scenes did have some tension in them but let's face it - 5 card stud is at the shallow end of the poker pool.
While it is not popular anymore, I enjoy the game because skill (bluffing and reading the other players), has a bigger role than the actual cards in your hand, compared to most any other game.
Quote: Romes
As you said, Rounders. Possibly some aspects of Pool Hall Junkies too (rounders but for pool).
Also, I still am curious: What do other people think the plot was, or what Marky Mark's character was thinking the whole movie???
Quote: AxelWolf
Focus is about a conn man Some parts were good.
It has a betting scene in it that's fairly close to someones actual emotions during a tilt( or hot suckered ) episode.
The movie could've been good without all the the romantic cutesy BS and if it was a lot darker and they didn't try so hard.
Quote: Romes
Does anyone else have any idea or theory behind this movie??
I created a better story line and ending in my head within 10 minutes of the movie ending:
Quote: JohnnyQ
So screen credits for ROMES for "The Gambler 2"..... straight to DVD ? Perhaps we could get CET to fund it, since apparently they are not very good at investing. | |||
6235 | dbpedia | 1 | 20 | https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-onlocation-gambler-filming-los-angeles-20141231-story.html | en | For ‘The Gambler,’ filmmaker sought a less familiar side of L.A. | https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3492c42/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1075+0+145/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F0e%2F93%2F21d4264b6928483c28fad89ebe92%2Fla-fi-0131-ct-onlocation-gambler-02-jpg-20141230 | https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3492c42/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1075+0+145/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F0e%2F93%2F21d4264b6928483c28fad89ebe92%2Fla-fi-0131-ct-onlocation-gambler-02-jpg-20141230 | [
"https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/a5e2ba4/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5455x3648+0+0/resize/320x214!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F6c%2Ff1%2F40fe3f124ad6b733583a9da5a22b%2F1456992-et-mn-hollywood-workers-relocating-zac-1766.jpg 320w,https://ca-times.brigh... | [] | [] | [
"Gambler",
"Rupert Wyatt",
"Mark Wahlberg",
"William Monahan"
] | null | [
"Richard Verrier",
"www.latimes.com",
"richard-verrier"
] | 2014-12-31T13:30:00+00:00 | Before he began filming "The Gambler," English director Rupert Wyatt gave strict instructions to his director of photography. | en | /apple-touch-icon.png | Los Angeles Times | https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-onlocation-gambler-filming-los-angeles-20141231-story.html | Before he began filming “The Gambler,” English director Rupert Wyatt gave strict instructions to his director of photography.
“Every time we see a palm tree, move the camera,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to see it. Try to subvert people’s concept of what L.A. is.”
Revealing a less familiar side of L.A. was an important guiding philosophy behind Wyatt’s approach to making the recently released movie, which stars Mark Wahlberg as burned-out English professor and high-stakes gambler Jim Bennett.
“The Gambler” takes viewers on a seven-day personal journey through L.A.’s underbelly, highlighting rarely filmed locations intended to depict the City of Angels in a fresh light.
“I’ve lived in L.A. for six years and have really grown to love it for all of its diversity,” Wyatt said. “One of my influences with this film was [director] Hal Ashby. He really gave the city a heartbeat and warmth. That’s what I wanted to do with this film.”
The Paramount Pictures movie, which cost $25 million to make, has reaped nearly $16 million at the box office since it opened Christmas Day.
Adapted from a 1974 film of the same name, “The Gambler” is an L.A.-based story written by William Monahan, the screenwriter for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed.”
John Goodman and Jessica Lange also star in the film, which was one of a handful of high-profile studio movies produced in L.A. this year and that benefited from a California film tax credit.
Production activity for feature films in the L.A. area rose 19% last year. But that came mainly from low-budget productions; most major studio movies film outside California to cash in on higher tax breaks and rebates elsewhere. Feature film production in the L.A. area has fallen about 50% from its peak nearly 20 years ago.
Except for a few scenes in Palm Springs and Joshua Tree, “The Gambler” was filmed entirely in Greater Los Angeles.
The movie was unusually location-intensive, filming about 40 locations over 40 days from January through March.
To lend realism and authenticity to the film, producers shunned soundstages and relied mainly on practical locations in Beverly Hills, downtown L.A., Koreatown, Pacific Palisades, Pasadena and Dana Point.
“When you go into a location, there is so much there for you already in the textures in the wall, even the smell,” Wyatt said. “We got to explore locations that haven’t been shot in years.”
Finding fresh locations to represent L.A. fell to veteran location manager Chris Baugh, whose previous projects have included the Oscar-winning movie “Argo,” “Angels and Demons” and the TV series “Arrested Development.”
“Rupert wanted to shoot locations that hadn’t been featured much in the past, which is a pretty difficult task considering how much film production has happened in L.A. over the years,” he said. “So what I did was try to find sites that other companies would usually pass over.”
Among the more challenging locations was a mid-20th century house where Wahlberg’s character lived near Benedict Canyon. Dubbed a “tree house,” it was built on stilts in the woods and wasn’t accessible by car.
Baugh found an abandoned swimming pool at the Pasadena YMCA building designed by architect Julia Morgan to represent the place where gangsters confront Jim.
He spent several nights visiting gritty underground clubs in Koreatown with friends to find the right locations for key gambling scenes.
Besides filming in Koreatown, they aimed their cameras at downtown L.A. alleys, underground tunnels and back stages of landmarks such as the Palace Theatre on South Broadway, where designers converted a cluttered basement into a gambling parlor. The Los Angeles Theatre Centre on Spring Street was the setting for a lecture hall. Other college scenes were filmed on the USC campus.
Although the crew avoided well-known sites, one notable exception was the Playboy Mansion, which doubled as the home of Lange’s character. Baugh convinced producers that viewers wouldn’t necessarily pick out the Gothic-style Holmby Hills residence from other Southern California mansions.
Some locations took weeks of preparation.
“It’s kind of like throwing a full-scale wedding with 200 guests every day for 40 days,” he said. “It’s a lot to handle.”
Twitter: @rverrier | ||
2453 | dbpedia | 2 | 7 | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/ | en | Quantum Computing (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | [
"https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sep-man-red.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/Blochsphere.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/cnot1.jpg",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/Had1.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/djalgo.png",
"h... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | null | 1. A Brief History of the Field
1.1 Physical Computational Complexity
A mathematical model for a universal computer was defined long before the invention of quantum computers and is called the Turing machine. It consists of (a) an unbounded tape divided (in one dimension) into cells, (b) a “read-write head” capable of reading or writing one of a finite number of symbols from or to a cell at a specific location, and (c) an instruction table (instantiating a transition function) which, given the machine’s initial “state of mind” (one of a finite number of such states that can be visited any number of times in the course of a computation) and the input read from the tape in that state, determines (i) the symbol to be written to the tape at the current head position, (ii) the subsequent displacement (to the left or to the right) of the head, and (iii) the machine’s final state. In 1936 Turing (1936) showed that since one can encode the instruction table of any given Turing machine \(T\) as a binary number \(\#(T)\), there exists a universal Turing machine \(U\) which, upon reading a given \(\#(T)\) from its tape, can simulate the operation of \(T\) on any input.
In mathematics, an effective method, informally speaking, is a method consisting of a finite number of precise finite-length instructions, guaranteed to produce some desired result in a finite number of steps if followed exactly by a human being using nothing other than paper and pencil (Papayannopoulos 2023). That the Turing machine model formally captures the concept of effective calculability in its entirety is the essence of the Church-Turing thesis. Since the thesis involves both a precise mathematical notion (i.e., that of a Turing machine) and an informal and intuitive notion (i.e., that of an effective method), however, strictly speaking it cannot be proved or disproved but is arguably best thought of as an explication in Carnap’s sense (Carnap 1962, ch. I).
Simple cardinality considerations show, in any case, that not all functions are Turing-computable (the set of all Turing machines is countable, while the set of all functions from the natural numbers to the natural numbers is not), and the discovery of this fact came as a complete surprise in the 1930s (Davis 1958). But as interesting and important as the question of whether a given function is computable by Turing machine—the purview of computability theory (Boolos, Burgess, & Jeffrey 2007)—is, it is not the only question that interests computer scientists. Beginning especially in the 1960s (Cobham 1965; Edmonds 1965; Hartmanis & Stearns 1965), the question of the cost of computing a function also came to be of great importance. This cost, also known as computational complexity, is measured naturally in terms of the physical resources (in particular time and space, given in terms of computational steps and memory locations, respectively) required in order to solve the computational problem at hand. Computer scientists classify computational problems according to the way their cost function behaves as a function of their input size, \(n\) (the number of bits required to store the input). Tractable, or efficiently solvable, problems are those that can be solved in “polynomial time”; i.e., in a number of time steps that is bounded by a polynomial function of the size of the input, while intractable problems are those which cannot, i.e., that require “exponential” time.
For a deterministic Turing machine (DTM) like the ones we have been discussing so far, its behaviour at any given time is wholly determined by its state plus whatever its input happens to be. In other words such machines have a unique transition function. We can generalise the Turing model, however, by allowing a machine to instantiate more than one transition function simultaneously. A nondeterministic Turing machine (NTM), upon being presented with a given input in a given state, is allowed to ‘choose’ which of its transition functions to follow, and we say that it solves a given problem whenever, given some input, there exists at least one path through its state space leading to a solution. Exactly how an NTM “chooses” whether to follow one transition function rather than another at a given moment in time is left undefined (Turing originally conceived these choices as those of an external operator). In particular, we do not assume that any probabilities are attached to these choices. In a probabilistic Turing machine (PTM), by contrast, we characterise the computer’s choices by associating a particular probability with each of its possible transitions.
Probabilistic and deterministic Turing machines (DTMs) have different success criteria. A successful deterministic algorithm for a given problem is guaranteed to yield the correct answer given its input. Of a successful probabilistic algorithm, on the other hand, we only demand that it yield a correct answer with “high” probability (minimally, we demand that it be strictly greater than 1/2). It was generally believed, until relatively recently, that for some problems (see, e.g. Rabin 1976) probabilistic algorithms are dramatically more efficient than any deterministic alternative; in other words that the set or “class” of problems efficiently solvable by PTM is larger than the class of problems efficiently solvable by DTM. It is now generally believed that the PTM model does not, in fact, offer a computational advantage in this sense over the DTM model (Arora & Barak 2009, ch. 20). Probabilistic (Turing) computation is nevertheless interesting to consider, because abstractly a quantum computer is just a variation on the PTM that does appear to offer computational advantages over deterministic computation, although as already mentioned this conjecture still awaits a proof.
The class \(\mathbf{P}\) (for Polynomial) is the class containing all the computational decision problems that can be solved by a DTM in polynomial time. The class NP (for Non-deterministic Polynomial) is the class containing all the computational decision problems that can be solved by an NTM in polynomial time.[1] The most famous problems in NP are called “NP-complete”, where “complete” designates the fact that these problems stand or fall together: Either they are all tractable, or none of them is! If we knew how to solve an NP-complete problem efficiently (i.e., with polynomial cost) we could use it to efficiently solve any other problem in NP (Cook 1971). Today we know of hundreds of examples of NP-complete problems (Garey & Johnson 1979), all of which are reducible one to another with no more than a polynomial slowdown. Since the best known algorithm for any of these problems is exponential, the widely believed conjecture is that there is no polynomial algorithm that can solve them. Clearly \(\mathbf{P} \subseteq \mathbf{NP}\). Proving or disproving the conjecture that \(\mathbf{P} \ne \mathbf{NP}\), however, remains perhaps one of the most important open questions in computer science. The class BPP (bounded probabilistic polynomial) is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time with “high” probability (see above) by a PTM. Finally, the class BQP is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time with “high” probability by a quantum computer. From the perspective of computer science, answering the question of whether quantum computers are more powerful than classical computers amounts to determining whether BPP \(\subsetneq\) BQP is true (see Cuffaro 2018b).
Although the original Church-Turing thesis involves the abstract mathematical notion of computability, physicists as well as computer scientists often interpret it as saying something about the scope and limitations of physical computing machines. Wolfram (1985) claims that any physical system can be simulated (to any degree of approximation) by a universal Turing machine, and that complexity bounds on Turing machine simulations have physical significance. For example, if the computation of the minimum energy of some system of \(n\) particles requires at least an exponentially increasing number of steps in \(n\), then the actual relaxation of this system to its minimum energy state will also take exponential time. Aharonov (1999) strengthens this thesis (in the context of showing its putative incompatibility with quantum mechanics) when she says that a PTM can simulate any reasonable physical device at polynomial cost.
In order for the “physical Church-Turing thesis” to make sense one has to relate physical space and time parameters to their computational counterparts: memory capacity and number of computation steps, respectively. There are various ways to do that, leading to different formulations of the thesis (see Copeland 2018; Gandy 1980; Pitowsky 1990; Sieg & Byrnes 1999). For example, one can encode the set of instructions of a universal Turing machine and the state of its infinite tape in the binary development of the position coordinates of a single particle. Consequently, one can physically ‘realise’ a universal Turing machine as a billiard ball with hyperbolic mirrors (Moore 1990; Pitowsky 1996).
It should be stressed that strictly speaking there is no relation between the original Church-Turing thesis and its physical version (Pitowsky & Shagrir 2003), and while the former concerns the concept of computation that is relevant to logic (since it is strongly tied to the notion of proof which requires validation), it does not analytically entail that all computations should be subject to validation. Indeed, there is a long historical tradition of analog computations (Dewdney 1984; Maley 2023; Papayannopoulos 2020), and the output of these computations is validated either by repetitive “runs” or by validating the physical theory that presumably governs the behaviour of the analog computer.
1.2 Physical “Short-cuts” of Computation
Do physical processes exist which contradict the physical Church-Turing thesis? Apart from analog computation, there exist at least two main kinds of example purporting to show that the notion of recursion, or Turing-computability, is not a natural physical property (Hogarth 1994; Pitowsky 1990; Pour-el & Richards 1981). Although the physical systems involved (a specific initial condition for the wave equation in three dimensions and an exotic solution to Einstein’s field equations, respectively) are somewhat contrived, a school of “hypercomputation” that aspires to extend the limited examples of physical “hypercomputers” and in so doing to physically “compute” the non-Turing-computable has nevertheless emerged (Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Németi, & Székely 2018; Copeland 2002, 2011; Davis 2003). Quantum hypercomputation is less frequently discussed in the literature (see, e.g., Adamyan, Calude, & Pavlov 2004), but arguably the most concrete attempt to harness quantum theory to compute the non-computable is the suggestion to use the quantum adiabatic algorithm (see below) to solve Hilbert’s Tenth Problem (Kieu 2002, 2004)—a Turing-undecidable problem equivalent to the halting problem—though this alleged quantum adiabatic hypercomputer has been criticised as unphysical (see Hagar & Korolev 2007; Hodges 2005 [Other Internet Resources]).
Setting aside hypercomputers, even if we restrict ourselves only to Turing-computable functions, one can still find many proposals in the literature that purport to display “short-cuts” in computational resources. Consider, e.g., the DNA model of computation that was claimed (Adleman 1994; Lipton 1995) to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. A closer inspection shows that the cost of the computation in this model is still exponential since the number of molecules in the physical system grows exponentially with the size of the problem. Or take an allegedly instantaneous solution to another NP-complete problem using a construction of rods and balls (Vergis, Steiglitz, & Dickinson 1986) that unfortunately ignores the accumulating time-delays in the rigid rods that result in an exponential overall slowdown. It appears that these and other similar models cannot serve as counter-examples to the physical Church-Turing thesis (as far as complexity is concerned) since they all require some exponential physical resource. Note, however, that all these models are described using classical physics, hence the unavoidable question: Can the shift to quantum physics allow us to find computational short-cuts? The quest for the quantum computer began with the possibility of giving a positive answer to this question.
1.3 Milestones
As early as 1969 Steven Wiesner suggested quantum information processing as a possible way to better accomplish cryptologic tasks. But the first four published papers on quantum information (Wiesner published his only in 1983), belong to Alexander Holevo (1973), R. P. Poplavskii (1975), Roman Ingarden (1976), and Yuri Manin (1980). Better known are contributions made in the early 1980s by Charles H. Bennett of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Paul A. Benioff of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, and Richard P. Feynman of the California Institute of Technology. The idea emerged when scientists were investigating the fundamental physical limits of computation: If technology continued to abide by “Moore’s Law” (the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every 18 months since the integrated circuit was invented), then the continually shrinking size of circuitry packed onto silicon chips would eventually reach a point where individual elements would be no larger than a few atoms. But since the physical laws that govern the behaviour and properties of the putative circuit at the atomic scale are inherently quantum-mechanical in nature, not classical, the natural question arose whether a new kind of computer could be devised based on the principles of quantum physics.
Inspired by Ed Fredkin’s ideas on reversible computation (see Hagar 2016), Feynman was among the first to attempt to provide an answer to this question by producing an abstract model in 1982 that showed how a quantum system could be used to do computations. He also explained how such a machine would be able to act as a simulator for quantum physics, conjecturing that any classical computer could do the same task only inefficiently. In 1985, David Deutsch proposed the first universal quantum Turing machine, which paved the way to the quantum circuit model (Deutsch 1989) and the development of quantum algorithms.
The 1990s saw the discovery of the Deutsch-Josza algorithm (1992) and of Simon’s algorithm (1994). The latter supplied the basis for Shor’s factoring algorithm. Published in 1994, this algorithm marked a “phase transition” in the development of quantum computing and sparked a tremendous interest even outside the physics community. In that year the first experimental realisation of the quantum CNOT (controlled-not) gate with trapped ions was proposed by Cirac & Zoller (1995). In 1995, Peter Shor and Andrew Steane proposed (independently) the first scheme for quantum error-correction. In that same year the first realisation of a quantum logic gate was done in Boulder, Colorado, following Cirac and Zoller’s proposal. In 1996, Lov Grover from Bell Labs invented a quantum search algorithm which yields a provable (though only quadratic) “speed-up” compared to its classical counterparts. A year later the first model for quantum computation based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques was proposed. This technique was realised in 1998 with a 2-qubit register, and was scaled up to 7 qubits in the Los Alamos National Lab in 2000.
The adiabatic and cluster-state models of quantum computing were discovered in 2000 and 2002, respectively (Farhi, Goldstone, Gutmann, & Sipser 2000; Raussendorf & Briegel 2002) and in 2011 D-Wave systems announced the creation of “D-Wave one,” an adiabatic quantum computer system running on a 128-qubit processor (Johnson, Amin, Gildert, et al. 2011). The late 2010s saw the beginning of the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) era (Preskill 2018), and in 2019 scientists affiliated with Google LLC announced (Arute, Arya, Babbush, & coauthors 2019) that they had achieved “quantum computational supremacy” (Aaronson 2019 [Other Internet Resources])—the actual existence of a (in this case, NISQ) quantum computer capable of solving a specific problem for which no efficient classical algorithm is known—at least until 2022 when a classical algorithm to outperform Google LLC’s quantum computer was discovered (Pan, Chen, & Zhang 2022), not to mention subsequent theoretical results demonstrating the inherent limitations of Google LLC’s approach (Aharonov, Gao, Landau, Liu, & Vazirani 2023). Despite the tremendous growth of the field since the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, the basic questions remain open even today: (1) theoretically, can quantum algorithms efficiently solve classically intractable problems? (2) operationally, can we actually realise a large scale quantum computer to run these algorithms?
2. Basics
In this section we review the basic paradigm for quantum algorithms, namely the quantum circuit model, which comprises the basic quantum unit of information (the qubit) and the basic logical manipulations thereof (quantum gates). For more detailed introductions see Nielsen & Chuang (2010) and Mermin (2007).
2.1 The Qubit
The qubit is the quantum analogue of the bit, the classical fundamental unit of information. It is a mathematical object with specific properties that can be realised in an actual physical system in many different ways. Just as the classical bit has a state—either 0 or 1—a qubit also has a state. Yet contrary to the classical bit, \(\lvert 0\rangle\) and \(\lvert 1\rangle\) are but two possible states of the qubit, and any linear combination (superposition) thereof is also possible. In general, thus, the physical state of a qubit is the superposition \(\lvert\psi \rangle = \alpha \lvert 0\rangle + \beta \lvert 1\rangle\) (where \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are complex numbers). The state of a qubit can be described as a vector in a two-dimensional Hilbert space, a complex vector space (see the entry on quantum mechanics). The special states \(\lvert 0\rangle\) and \(\lvert 1\rangle\) are known as the computational basis states, and form an orthonormal basis for this vector space. According to quantum theory, when we try to measure the qubit in this basis in order to determine its state, we get either \(\lvert 0\rangle\) with probability \(\lvert \alpha\rvert^2\) or \(\lvert 1\rangle\) with probability \(\lvert \beta\rvert^2\). Since \(\lvert \alpha\rvert^2 + \lvert\beta\rvert^2 = 1\) (i.e., the qubit is a unit vector in the aforementioned two-dimensional Hilbert space), we may (ignoring the overall phase factor) effectively write its state as \(\lvert \psi \rangle =\) cos\((\theta)\lvert 0\rangle + e^{i\phi}\)sin\((\theta)\lvert 1\rangle\), where the numbers \(\theta\) and \(\phi\) define a point on the unit three-dimensional sphere, as shown in the figure below. This sphere is typically called the Bloch sphere, and it provides a useful means to visualise the state space of a single qubit.
Since \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are complex and therefore continuous variables one might think that a single qubit is capable of storing an infinite amount of information. When measured, however, it yields only the classical result (0 or 1) with certain probabilities specified by the quantum state. In other words, the measurement changes the state of the qubit, “collapsing” it from a superposition to one of its terms. In fact one can prove (Holevo 1973) that the amount of information actually retrievable from a single qubit (what Timpson (2013, 47ff.) calls its “accessible information”) is no more than one bit. If the qubit is not measured, however, the amount of “hidden” information it “stores” (what Timpson calls its “specification information”) is conserved under its (unitary) dynamical evolution. This feature of quantum mechanics allows one to manipulate the information stored in unmeasured qubits with quantum gates (i.e. unitary transformations), and is one of the sources for the putative power of quantum computers.
As an illustration, let us suppose we have two qubits at our disposal. A pair of qubits has four computational basis states: {\(\lvert 00\rangle, \lvert 01\rangle, \lvert 10\rangle, \lvert 11\rangle\)}. If these were classical bits, they would represent the four physically possible states of the system. But a pair of qubits can also exist in what can be described as a superposition of these four basis states, each of which has its own complex coefficient (whose mod square, being interpreted as a probability, is normalised). As long as the quantum system evolves unitarily and is unmeasured, it can be imagined to “store” that many bits of (specification) information. The difficult task, however, is to use this information efficiently in light of the bound on the state’s accessible information.
2.2 Quantum Gates
Classical computational gates are Boolean logic gates that manipulate information stored in bits. In quantum computing such gates are represented by matrices, and can be visualised as rotations over the Bloch sphere. This visualisation represents the fact that quantum gates are unitary operators, i.e., they preserve the norm of the quantum state (i.e., \(U^{\dagger}U=I\), where \(U\) is a linear operator representing a quantum gate and \(U^{\dagger}\) is its adjoint). In classical computing some gates are “universal”. For instance, all of the possible logical connections between two inputs A and B can be realised using some string of NAND gates (which each evaluate the function “not both A and B”). Another universal gate is NOR. In the context of quantum computing it was shown (DiVincenzo 1995) that two-qubit gates (i.e. that transform two qubits) are sufficient to realise any quantum circuit, in the sense that a circuit composed exclusively from (a small set of) one- and two-qubit gates can approximate to arbitrary accuracy any unitary transformation of \(n\) qubits. Barenco et. al. (1995) showed in particular that any multiple-qubit logic gate may be composed in this sense from a combination of single-qubit gates and the two-qubit controlled-not (CNOT) gate, which either flips or preserves its “target” input bit depending on the state of its “control” input bit (specifically: in a CNOT gate the output state of the target qubit is the result of an operation analogous to the classical exclusive-OR (XOR) gate on the inputs). One general feature of quantum gates that distinguishes them from classical gates is that they are always reversible: the inverse of a unitary matrix is also a unitary matrix, and thus a quantum gate can always be inverted by another quantum gate.
\[ \textrm{CNOT} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \end{array} \right]. \]
The CNOT Gate
Unitary gates manipulate information stored in the “quantum register”—a quantum system—and in this sense ordinary (unitary) quantum evolution can be regarded as a computation. In order to read the result of this computation, however, the quantum register must be measured. Measurement is represented as a non-unitary gate that “collapses” the quantum superposition in the register onto one of its terms with a probability corresponding to that term’s complex coefficient. Usually this is described with respect to the computational basis, but in principle a measurement could be carried out in any of the infinitely many possible orthonormal bases with respect to which a given state \(| \psi \rangle\) can be expressed as a linear combination of basis states. It so happens that some such measurements are more difficult to implement than others.
2.3 Quantum Circuits
Quantum circuits are similar to classical computer circuits in that they consist of logical wires and gates. The wires are used to carry the information, while the gates manipulate it (note that the wires are abstract and do not necessarily correspond to physical wires; they may correspond to a physical particle, e.g. a photon, moving from one location to another in space, or even to time-evolution). Conventionally, the input of the quantum circuit is assumed to be a number of qubits each initialised to a computational basis state (typically \(\lvert 0\rangle\)). The output state of the circuit is then measured in some orthonormal basis (usually the computational basis).
The first quantum algorithms (i.e., Deutsch-Jozsa, Simon, Shor and Grover) were constructed in this paradigm. Additional paradigms for quantum computing exist today that differ from the circuit model in many interesting ways. So far, however, they all have been demonstrated to be computationally equivalent to the circuit model (see below), in the sense that any computational problem that can be solved by the circuit model can be solved by these new models with only a polynomial overhead in computational resources. We note the parallel here with the various classical computational models, for which it is also the case that any “reasonable” such model can be efficiently simulated by any other (for discussion, see Cuffaro 2018b, 274).
3 Quantum Algorithms
Algorithm design is a highly complicated task, and in quantum computing, delicately leveraging the features of quantum mechanics in order to make an algorithm more efficient makes the task even more complicated. But before discussing this aspect of quantum algorithm design, let us first convince ourselves that quantum computers can actually simulate classical computation. In some sense this is obvious, given the belief in the universal character of quantum mechanics, and the observation that any quantum computation that is diagonal in the computational basis, i.e., that involves no interference between the qubits, is effectively classical. Yet the demonstration that quantum circuits can be used to simulate classical circuits is not straightforward (recall that the former are always reversible while the latter use gates which are in general irreversible). Indeed, quantum circuits cannot be used directly to simulate classical computation, but the latter can still be simulated on a quantum computer using an intermediate gate, namely the Toffoli gate. This universal classical gate has three input bits and three output bits. Two of the input bits are control bits, unaffected by the action of the gate. The third input bit is a target bit that is flipped if both control bits are set to 1, and otherwise is left alone. This gate is reversible (its inverse is itself), but by stringing a number of such gates together one can simulate any classical circuit. Consequently, using the quantum version of the Toffoli gate (which by definition permutes the computational basis states similarly to the classical Toffoli gate) one can simulate, although rather tediously, irreversible classical logic gates with quantum reversible ones. Quantum computers are thus capable of performing any computation which a classical deterministic computer can do.
What about probabilistic computation? Not surprisingly, a quantum computer can also simulate this type of computation by using another famous quantum gate, namely the Hadamard gate, a single-qubit gate that takes the input state \(\lvert 0\rangle\) to \(\frac{\lvert 0\rangle + \lvert 1\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}\) and the input state \(\lvert 1\rangle\) to \(\frac{\lvert 0\rangle - \lvert 1\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}\). Measuring either of these output states yields \(\lvert 0\rangle\) or \(\lvert 1\rangle\) with 50/50 probability, which can be used to simulate a fair coin toss.
\[ H = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left[ \begin{array}{cc} 1 & 1 \\ 1 & -1 \end{array}\right] \]
The Hadamard Gate
Obviously, if quantum algorithms could be used only to simulate classical algorithms the interest in them would be far more limited than it currently is. But while there may always be some computational problems that resist quantum speed-up (see Myers 1997 and Linden & Popescu 1998 [Other Internet Resources]), there is a general confidence in the community that quantum algorithms may not only simulate classical ones, but that they will actually outperform the latter in some cases, with debatable (Cuffaro 2018b; Hagar 2007) implications for our abstract notions of tractability and intractability.
3.1 Quantum Circuit-Based Algorithms
3.1.1 Oracles
The first quantum algorithms were designed to solve problems which essentially involve the use of an “oracle”, so let us begin by explaining this term. An oracle is a conceptual device that has proven useful in the complexity-theoretic analysis of computational problems, which one can think of as a kind of imaginary magic black box (Arora & Barak 2009, 72–73; Aaronson 2013a, 29ff.) to which, like the famous oracle at Delphi, one poses (yes or no) questions. Unlike that ancient oracle, the oracles considered in computer science always return an answer in a single time step. For example, we can imagine an oracle to determine whether a given Boolean formula is satisfiable or not: Given as input the description of a particular propositional formula, the oracle outputs—in a single time step—a single bit indicating whether or not there is a truth-value assignment satisfying that formula. Obviously such a machine does not really exist—SAT (short for satisfiability) is an NP-complete problem—but that is not the point. The point of using such imaginary devices is to abstract away from certain “implementational details” which are for whatever reason deemed unimportant for answering a given complexity-theoretic question. For example, Simon’s problem (Simon 1994) is that of determining the period of a given function \(f\) that is periodic under bit-wise modulo-2 addition. Relative to Simon’s problem, we judge the internal complexity of \(f\) to be unimportant, and so abstract away from it by imagining that we have an oracle to evaluate it in a single step. As useful as these conceptual devices are, however, their usefulness has limitations. To take one example, there are oracles relative to which P = NP, as well as oracles relative to which P \(\not =\) NP. This (and many other) questions are not clarified by oracles (see Fortnow 1994).
3.1.2 Deutsch’s Algorithm
Deutsch (1989) asks the following question: Suppose we have a function \(f\) which can be either constant—i.e. such that it produces the same output value for each of its possible inputs, or balanced—i.e. such that the output of one half of its possible inputs is the opposite of the output of the other half. The particular example considered is a function \(f : \{0,1\} \rightarrow \{0,1\}\), which is constant if \(f\)(0) \(= f\)(1) and balanced if \(f\)(0) \(\ne f\)(1). Classically it would take two evaluations of the function to tell whether it is one or the other. Quantum-mechanically, we can answer this question in one evaluation.
A Schematic Representation of Deutsch’s Algorithm
After initially preparing (Mermin 2007, ch. 2) the first and second qubits of the computer in the state \(\lvert 0\rangle\lvert 0\rangle\), one then “flips” both qubits (see the Figure above) using “NOT” gates (i.e. Pauli X transformations) to \(\lvert 1 \rangle\), and then subjects each qubit to a Hadamard gate. One then sends the two qubits through an oracle or ‘black box’ which one imagines as a unitary gate, \(\mathbf{U}_f\), representative of the function whose character (of being either constant or balanced) we wish to determine, where we define \(\mathbf{U}_f\) so that it takes inputs like \(\lvert x,y\rangle\) to \(\lvert x, y\oplus f (x)\rangle\), such that \(\oplus\) is addition modulo two (i.e. exclusive-or). The first qubit is then fed into a further Hadamard gate, and the final output of the algorithm (prior to measurement) is the state:
\[\frac{1}{2}| 1 \rangle(| f(0) \rangle - | \hat{f}(0) \rangle)\]
whenever \(f\) is constant, and the state:
\[\frac{1}{2}| 0 \rangle(| f(0) \rangle - | \hat{f}(0) \rangle)\]
whenever \(f\) is balanced, where \(\hat{f}(x) \equiv 1 \oplus f(x)\). Since the computational basis states are orthogonal to one another, a single measurement of the first qubit suffices to retrieve the answer to our original question regarding the function’s nature. And since there are two possible constant functions and two possible balanced functions from \(f : \{0,1\} \rightarrow \{0,1\}\), we can characterise the algorithm as distinguishing, using only one oracle call, between two quantum disjunctions without finding out the truth values of the disjuncts themselves, i.e. without determining which balanced or which constant function \(f\) is (Bub 2010).
A generalisation of Deutsch’s problem, called the Deutsch-Jozsa problem (Deutsch & Jozsa 1992), enlarges the class of functions under consideration so as to include all of the functions \(f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}\), i.e., rather than only considering \(n = 1\). The best deterministic classical algorithm for determining whether a given such function is constant or balanced requires \(\frac{2^{n}}{2}+1\) queries to an oracle. In a quantum computer, however, we can answer the question using one oracle call. As with Deutsch’s algorithm, an analysis shows that the reason why a quantum computer only requires one call to the oracle to evaluate the global property of the function in question, is that the output state of the computer is a superposition of balanced and constant states such that the balanced states all lie in a subspace of the system’s Hilbert space orthogonal to that of the constant states and can therefore be distinguished from the latter in a single measurement (Bub 2006a).
3.1.3 Simon’s Algorithm
Suppose we have a Boolean function \(f\) on \(n\) bits that is 2-to-1, i.e. that takes \(n\) bits to \(n-1\) bits in such a way that for every \(n\)-bit integer \(x_1\) there is an \(n\)-bit integer \(x_2\) for which \(f (x_{1}) = f (x_{2})\). The function is moreover periodic in the sense that \(f(x_1)\) = \(f(x_2)\) if and only if \(x_1 = x_2 \oplus a\), where \(\oplus\) designates bit-wise modulo 2 addition and \(a\) is an \(n\)-bit nonzero number called the period of \(f\). Simon’s problem is the problem to find \(a\) given \(f\). Relative to an oracle \(U_f\) that evaluates \(f\) in a single step, Simon’s quantum algorithm (Simon 1994) finds the period of \(f\) in a number of oracle calls that grows only linearly with the length of \(n\), while the best known classical algorithm requires an exponentially greater number of oracle calls. Simon’s algorithm reduces to Deutsch’s algorithm when \(n=2\), and can be regarded as an extension of the latter, in the sense that in both cases a global property of a function is evaluated in no more than a (sub-)polynomial number of oracle invocations, owing to the fact that the output state of the computer just before the final measurement is decomposed into orthogonal subspaces, only one of which contains the problem’s solution. Note that one important difference between Deutsch’s and Simon’s algorithms is that the former yields a solution with certainty, whereas the latter only yields a solution with probability very close to 1. For more on the logical analysis of these first quantum circuit-based algorithms see Bub (2006a) and Bub (2010).
3.1.4 Shor’s Algorithm
The algorithms just described, although demonstrating the potential superiority of quantum over classical computation, nevertheless deal with apparently unimportant computational problems. Moreover the speed-ups in each of them are only relative to their respective oracles. It is therefore doubtful whether research into quantum computing would have attracted so much attention in the 1990s had Shor not realised that Simon’s algorithm could be harnessed to solve a much more interesting and crucial problem, namely factoring, which lies at the heart of widely-used cryptographic protocols such as RSA (Rivest, Shamir, & Adleman 1978). Shor’s algorithm turned quantum computing into one of the most exciting research domains in quantum mechanics.
Shor’s algorithm exploits the ingenious number theoretic argument that two prime factors \(p,q\) of a positive integer \(N=pq\) can be found by determining the period, \(r\), of a function \(f(x) = y^x \textrm{mod} N,\) for any \(y < N\) which has no common factors with \(N\) other than 1 (Nielsen & Chuang 2010, app. 4). The period of \(f(x)\) depends on \(y\) and \(N\). If one knows it, one can factor \(N\) if \(r\) is even and if \(y^{\,\frac{r}{2}} \neq -1\) mod \(N\). This will be jointly the case with probability greater than \(\frac{1}{2}\) for any \(y\) chosen randomly (otherwise one chooses another value of \(y\) and tries again). The factors of \(N\) are the greatest common divisors of \(y^{\,\frac{r}{2}} \pm 1\) and \(N\), which can be found in polynomial time using the well known Euclidean algorithm. In other words, Shor’s remarkable result rests on the discovery that the problem of factoring reduces to the problem of finding the period of a certain periodic function. That this problem can be solved efficiently by a quantum computer is hinted at by Simon’s algorithm, which considers the more restricted case of functions periodic under bit-wise modulo-2 addition as opposed to the periodic functions under ordinary addition considered here.
Notwithstanding that factoring is believed to be only in NP and not in NP-complete (see Aaronson 2013a, 64–66), Shor’s result is arguably the most dramatic example of quantum speed-up known. To verify whether \(n\) is prime takes a number of steps which is polynomial in \(\log_{2}n\) (the binary encoding of a natural number \(n\) requires \(\log_{2}n\) resources). But nobody knows how to classically factor numbers into primes in polynomial time, and the best classical algorithms we have for this problem are sub-exponential. A number of widely-used modern cryptographic protocols are based on these facts (Giblin 1993), and the discovery that quantum computers can solve factoring in polynomial time has therefore had a dramatic effect. The implementation of the algorithm on a scalable architecture would consequently have economic, as well as scientific consequences (Alléaume et al. 2014).
3.1.5 Grover’s Algorithm
In a brilliant undercover operation, Agent 13 has managed to secure two crucial bits of information concerning the whereabouts of the arch-villain Siegfried: the phone number of the secret hideout from which he intends to begin carrying out KAOS’s plans for world domination, and the fact that the number is a listed one (apparently an oversight on Siegfried’s part). Unfortunately you and your colleagues at CONTROL have no other information besides this. Can you find Siegfried’s hideout using only this number and a phone directory? In theoretical computer science this task is known as an unstructured search. In the worst case, if there are \(n\) entries in the directory, the computational resources required to find the entry will be linear in \(n\). Grover (1996) showed how this task could be done with a quantum algorithm using computational resources on the order of only \(\sqrt{n}\). Agreed, this speed-up is more modest than Shor’s since unstructured search belongs to the class \(\mathbf{P}\), but contrary to Shor’s case, where the classical complexity of factoring is still unknown, here the superiority of the quantum algorithm, however modest, is definitely provable. That this quadratic speed-up is also the optimal quantum speed-up possible for this problem was proved by Bennett, Bernstein, Brassard, & Vazirani (1997).
Although the purpose of Grover’s algorithm is usually described as “searching a database”, it may be more accurate to describe it as “inverting a function”. Roughly speaking, if we have a function \(y=f(x)\) that can be evaluated on a quantum computer, Grover’s algorithm allows us to calculate \(x\) given \(y\). Inverting a function is related to searching a database because we could come up with a function that produces a particular value of \(y\) if \(x\) matches a desired entry in a database, and another value of \(y\) for other values of \(x\). The applications of Grover’s algorithm are far-reaching (even more so than foiling Siegfried’s plans for world domination). For example, it can be used to determine efficiently the number of solutions to an \(N\)-item search problem, hence to perform exhaustive searches on a class of solutions to an NP-complete problem and substantially reduce the computational resources required for solving it.
3.2 Adiabatic Algorithms
Many decades have passed since the discovery of the first quantum algorithm, but so far little progress has been made with respect to the “Holy Grail” of solving an NP-complete problem with a quantum circuit. In 2000 a group of physicists from MIT and Northeastern University (Farhi et al. 2000 [Other Internet Resources]) proposed a novel paradigm for quantum computing that differs from the circuit model in several interesting ways. Their goal was to try to decide with this algorithm instances of one of the most famous NP-complete problems: satisfiability. According to the adiabatic theorem (see, e.g., Messiah 1961) and given certain specific conditions, a quantum system remains in its lowest energy state, known as the ground state, along an adiabatic transformation in which the system is deformed slowly and smoothly from an initial Hamiltonian to a final Hamiltonian (as an illustration, think of moving a sleeping baby in a cradle from the living room to the bedroom. If the transition is done slowly and smoothly enough, and if the baby is a sound sleeper, then it will remain asleep during the whole transition). The most important condition in this theorem is the energy gap between the ground state and the next excited state (in our analogy, this gap reflects how sound asleep the baby is). Being inversely proportional to the evolution time \(T\), this gap controls the latter. If this gap exists during the entire evolution (i.e., there is no level crossing between the energy states of the system), the theorem dictates that in the adiabatic limit (when \(T\rightarrow \infty)\) the system will remain in its ground state. In practice, of course, \(T\) is always finite, but the longer it is, the less likely it is that the system will deviate from its ground state during the time evolution.
The crux of the quantum adiabatic algorithm which rests on this theorem lies in the possibility of encoding a specific instance of a given decision problem in a certain Hamiltonian (this can be done by capitalising on the well-known fact that any decision problem can be derived from an optimisation problem by incorporating into it a numerical bound as an additional parameter). One then starts the system in a ground state of another Hamiltonian which is easy to construct, and slowly evolves the system in time, deforming it towards the desired Hamiltonian. According to the quantum adiabatic theorem and given the gap condition, the result of such a physical process is another energy ground state that encodes the solution to the desired decision problem. The adiabatic algorithm is thus a rather ‘laid back’ algorithm: one needs only to start the system in its ground state, deform it adiabatically, and measure its final ground state in order to retrieve the desired result. But whether or not this algorithm yields the desired speed-up depends crucially on the behaviour of the energy gap as the number of degrees of freedom in the system increases. If this gap decreases exponentially with the size of the input, then the evolution time of the algorithm will increase exponentially; if the gap decreases polynomially, the decision problem so encoded could be solved efficiently. Physicists have been studying spectral gaps for almost a century, but they have only relatively recently begun to do so with computing in mind. It is now known that there exists no algorithm to determine, given the Hamiltonian of an arbitrary quantum many-body system, whether it is gapped or gapless (Cubitt, Perez-Garcia, & Wolf 2015). In practice, gap amplification techniques are employed in adiabatic quantum computers to ensure the existence of a gap throughout a computation (Albash & Lidar 2018, sec. F).
The quantum adiabatic algorithm holds much promise (Farhi et al. 2001). It has been shown (Aharonov et al. 2008) to be polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (that is, each model can simulate the other with only polynomial overhead in the number of qubits and computational steps), but the caveat that is sometimes left unmentioned is that its application to an intractable computational problem may sometimes require solving another, as intractable a task (this general worry was first raised by a philosopher; see Pitowsky 1990). Indeed, Reichardt (2004) has shown that there are simple problems for which the algorithm will get stuck in a local minimum, in which there are exponentially many eigenvalues all exponentially close to the ground state energy, so applying the adiabatic theorem, even for these simple problems, will take exponential time, and we are back to square one. For a recent survey of the state of the art, see Albash & Lidar (2018).
3.3 Measurement-Based Algorithms
Measurement-based algorithms differ from circuit algorithms in that instead of employing unitary evolution as the basic mechanism for the manipulation of information, these algorithms make essential use of measurements in the course of a computation and not only at the readout stage. They fall into two categories. The first is teleportation quantum computing, based on an idea of Gottesman & Chuang (1999), and developed into a computational model by Nielsen (2003) and Leung (2004). The second is the “one way quantum computer”, known also as the “cluster state” model (Raussendorf & Briegel 2002). The interesting feature of these models, which are polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (Raussendorf, Browne, & Briegel 2003), is that they can efficiently simulate unitary quantum dynamics using non-unitary measurements. This is accomplished (see Duwell 2021, 5.2) via measurements on a pool of highly entangled quantum systems such that the orthonormal basis in which each measurement is performed is calculated, via a classical computer, using the results of earlier measurements.
Measurement-based models are interesting from a foundational perspective for a number of reasons. To begin with, in these models there is a clear separation between the classical (i.e., the calculation of the next measurement-basis) and quantum (i.e., measurements on the entangled qubits) parts of a computation, which may make it easier to pinpoint the quantum resources that are responsible for speed-up. Further, they may offer insight into the role of entanglement in quantum computing. They may also have interesting engineering-related consequences, suggesting a different kind of computer architecture which is more fault tolerant (Brown & Roberts 2020; Nielsen & Dawson 2005).
3.4 Topological-Quantum-Field-Theory (TQFT) Algorithms
Another model for quantum computing which has attracted a lot of attention, especially from Microsoft inc. (Freedman 1998), is the Topological Quantum Field Theory model (Lahtinen & Pachos 2017). In contrast to the easily visualisable circuit model, this model resides in the most abstract reaches of theoretical physics. The exotic physical systems TQFT describes are topological states of matter. That the formalism of TQFT can be applied to computational problems was shown by Witten (1989) and the idea was later developed by others. One of the principal merits of the model, which is polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (Aharonov, Jones, & Landau 2009; Freedman, Kitaev, & Wang 2002), lies in its high tolerance to the errors which are inevitably introduced in the implementation of a large scale quantum computer (see below). Topology is especially helpful here because many global topological properties are, by definition, invariant under deformation, and given that most errors are local, information encoded in topological properties is robust against them.
4 Realisations
The quantum computer might be the theoretician’s dream, but as far as experimentalists are concerned, its full realisation, which involves resolving the still open question of how to combine the elements needed to build a quantum computer into scalable systems (see Van Meter & Horsman 2013), is a nightmare. Shor’s algorithm may break RSA encryption, but it will remain an anecdote if the largest number that it can factor is 21 (Martín-López et al. 2012; Skosana & Tame 2021). In the circuit-based model the problem is to achieve a scalable quantum system that at the same time will allow one to (1) robustly represent quantum information with (2) a time to decoherence significantly longer than the length of the computation, (3) implement a universal family of unitary transformations, (4) prepare a fiducial initial state, and (5) measure the output result (these are DiVincenzo (2000)’s five criteria). Alternative paradigms may trade some of these requirements with others, but the gist will remain the same, i.e., one would have to achieve control of one’s quantum system in such a way that the system will remain “quantum” albeit macroscopic or at least mesoscopic in its dimensions.
In order to deal with these challenges, several ingenious solutions have been devised, including quantum error correction codes and fault tolerant computation (Aharonov & Ben-Or 1997; de Beaudrap & Horsman 2020; Horsman, Fowler, Devitt, & Van Meter 2012; Raussendorf, Harrington, & Goyal 2008; Shor 1995; Shor & DiVincenzo 1996; Steane 1996) which can dramatically reduce the spread of errors during a ‘noisy’ quantum computation. An important criticism of these active error correction schemes, however, is that they are devised for a very unrealistic noise model which treats the computer as quantum and the environment as classical (Alicki, Lidar, & Zinardi 2006). Once a more realistic noise model is allowed, the feasibility of large scale, fault tolerant and computationally superior quantum computers is less clear (Hagar 2009; Tabakin 2017).
In the near term, a promising avenue for realising a quantum advantage in a limited number of problem domains is the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) paradigm (Lau, Lim, Shrotriya, & Kwek 2022; Preskill 2018). The NISQ paradigm does not employ any error correction mechanisms (postponing the problem to implement scalable versions of these to the future) but rather focuses on building computational components, and on tackling computational problems, that are inherently more resilient to noise. These include, for example, certain classes of optimisation problems, quantum semidefinite programming, and digital quantum simulation (Tacchino, Chiesa, Carretta, & Gerace 2020). A caveat here is that as the resiliency to noise of a circuit increases, the more classically it behaves.
As just mentioned, one of the envisioned applications of NISQ computing is for digital quantum simulation (i.e. simulation using a gate-based programmable quantum computer). There is an older tradition of analog quantum simulation, however, wherein one utilises a quantum system whose dynamics resemble the dynamics of a particular target system of interest. Although it is believed that digital quantum simulation will eventually supersede it, the field of analog quantum simulation has progressed substantially in the years since it was first proposed, and analog quantum simulators have already been used to study quantum dynamics in regimes thought to be beyond the reach of classical simulators (see, e.g., Bernien et al. 2017; for further discussion of the philosophical issues involved, see Hangleiter, Carolan, & Thébault 2022).
5 Philosophical Questions
In this section we review some of the important philosophical issues related to quantum computing that have been discussed in the philosophical and physical literature. For more detailed surveys of some of these issues that are still accessible to non-specialists, see Cuffaro (2022) and Duwell (2021).
5.1 What is Quantum in Quantum Computing?
Putting aside the problem of practically realising and implementing a large scale quantum computer, a crucial theoretical question remains open: What physical resources—which of the essential features of quantum mechanics—are responsible for the putative power of quantum computers to outperform classical computers? A number of candidates have been put forward. Fortnow (2003) posits interference as the key, though it has been suggested that this is not truly a quantum phenomenon (Spekkens 2007). Jozsa (1997) and many others point to entanglement, although there are purported counter-examples to this thesis (see, e.g., Linden & Popescu 1998 [Other Internet Resources], Biham, Brassard, Kenigsberg, & Mor 2004, and for a philosophical discussion of their significance see Cuffaro 2017). Howard, Wallman, Veitch, & Emerson (2014) appeal to quantum contextuality. For Bub (2010), the answer lies in the logical structure of quantum mechanics (cf. Dalla Chiara, Giuntini, Leporini, & Sergioli 2018), while Duwell (2018) argues for quantum parallelism. And for Deutsch (1997) and others it is “parallel worlds” which are the resource.
Speculative as it may seem, the question “what is quantum in quantum computing?” has significant practical consequences. It is almost certain that one of the reasons for the paucity of quantum algorithms that have actually been discovered is the lack of a full understanding of what makes a quantum computer quantum. Quantum computing skeptics (Levin 2003) happily capitalise on this: If no one knows why quantum computers are superior to classical ones, how can we be sure that they are, indeed, superior?
5.1.1 The Debate over Parallelism and Many Worlds
The answer that has tended to dominate the popular literature on quantum computing is motivated by evolutions such as:
\[\tag{1} \Sigma_{x} \lvert x\rangle \lvert 0\rangle \rightarrow \Sigma_{x} \lvert x\rangle \lvert f(x)\rangle,\]
which were common to many early quantum algorithms. Note the appearance that \(f\) is evaluated for each of its possible inputs simultaneously. The idea that we should take this at face value—that quantum computers actually do compute a function for many different input values simultaneously—is what Duwell (2018, 2021) calls the Quantum Parallelism Thesis (QPT). For Deutsch, who accepts it as true, the only reasonable explanation for the QPT is that the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is also true. For Deutsch, a quantum computer in superposition, like any other quantum system, exists in some sense in many classical universes simultaneously. These provide the physical arena within which the computer effects its parallel computations. This conclusion is also defended by Hewitt-Horsman (2009) and by Wallace (2012). Wallace notes, however, that the QPT—and hence the explanatory need for many worlds—may not be true of all or even most quantum algorithms.
For Pitowsky (2002) and Steane (2003), the explanation for quantum speedup is not to be found in quantum parallelism. Pitowsky (2002) asks us to consider a given solution, which has been found using a quantum circuit-based algorithm, to a problem like satisfiability. The quantum algorithm may appear to solve this problem by testing exponentially many assignments “at once” as suggested by (1), yet this quantum ‘miracle’ helps us very little since, as previously mentioned, any measurement performed on the output state collapses it, and if there is one possible truth assignment that solves this decision problem, the probability of retrieving it is no greater than it would be for a classical probabilistic Turing machine which guesses the solution and then checks it. Pitowsky’s conclusion is that achieving quantum speedup requires us to construct ‘clever’ superpositions that increase the probability of successfully retrieving the result far more than that of a pure guess (see also Aaronson 2022 [Other Internet Resources]). Steane (2003), among other things, argues that if we compare the information actually produced by quantum and classical algorithms, then we should conclude that quantum algorithms perform not more but fewer, cleverer, computations than classical algorithms (see, also, Section 5.1.2 below). Additionally Steane argues that the motivation for the QPT is at least partly due to misleading aspects of the standard quantum formalism.
Another critic of the MWI approach is Duwell, who (contra Pitowsky and Steane) accepts the QPT (Duwell 2018), but nevertheless denies (contra Deutsch) that it uniquely supports the MWI (Duwell 2007). Considering the phase relations between the terms in a superposition such as (1) is crucially important when evaluating a quantum algorithm’s computational efficiency. Phase relations, however, are global properties of a state. Thus a quantum computation, Duwell argues, does not consist solely of local parallel computations. But in this case, the QPT does not uniquely support the MWI over other explanations.
Defending the MWI, Hewitt-Horsman (2009) argues (contra Steane) that to state that quantum computers do not actually generate each of the evaluation instances represented in (1) is false according to the view: on the MWI such information could be extracted in principle given sufficiently advanced technology. Further, Hewitt-Horsman emphasises that the MWI is not motivated simply by a suggestive mathematical representation. Worlds on the MWI are defined according to their explanatory usefulness, manifested in particular by their stability and independence over the time scales relevant to the computation. Wallace (2012) argues similarly.
Aaronson (2013b) and Cuffaro (2012, 2022) point out that there is a prima facie tension between the Many Worlds Explanation (MWX) of Quantum Computing and the MWI. The latter typically employs decoherence as a criterion for distinguishing macroscopic worlds from one another. Quantum circuit model algorithms, however, utilise coherent superpositions. To distinguish computational worlds from one another, therefore, one needs to somehow modify the decoherence criterion, but Cuffaro questions whether this can be successfully motivated independently of a prior commitment to the MWI. Further, Cuffaro argues that the MWX is for all practical purposes incompatible with measurement based computation, for even granting the legitimacy of a modified world identification criterion, there is no natural way in this model to identify worlds that are stable and independent in the way required.
5.1.2 The Elusive Nature of Speed-Up
Even if we could rule out the MWX, identifying the physical resource(s) responsible for quantum speed-up would remain a difficult problem. Among other things the question raises important issues about how to measure the complexity of a given quantum algorithm, as well as issues about which quantum operations we can realistically expect to be able to implement (Geroch 2009, ch. 18; Schmitz 2023). The answers differ according to the particular model under consideration. In the adiabatic model one needs only to estimate the energy gap behaviour and its relation to the input size (encoded in the number of degrees of freedom of the Hamiltonian of the system). In the measurement-based model one counts the number of measurements needed to reveal the solution that is hidden in the input cluster state (since the preparation of the cluster state is a polynomial process, it does not add to the complexity of the computation). But in the circuit model things are not as straightforward. After all, the whole of the quantum circuit-based computation can be represented as a single unitary transformation from the input state to the output state.
This arguably suggests that the source of the power of a quantum computer, if any, lies not in its dynamics (i.e., the Schrödinger equation) per se, but rather in some feature of the quantum state, or “wave function”. Consider also that the Hilbert subspace “visited” during a quantum computational process is, at any moment, a linear space spanned by all of the vectors in the total Hilbert space which have been created by the computational process up to that moment. But this Hilbert subspace is thus a subspace spanned by a polynomial number of vectors and is thus at most a polynomial subspace of the total Hilbert space. A classical simulation of the quantum evolution on a Hilbert space with polynomial number of dimensions (that is, a Hilbert space spanned by a number of basis vectors which is polynomial in the number of qubits involved in the computation), however, can be carried out in a polynomial number of classical computations. Were quantum dynamics solely responsible for the power of quantum computing, the latter could be mimicked in a polynomial number of steps with a classical computer (see, e.g. Vidal 2003).
This is not to say that quantum computation is no more powerful than classical computation. The key point, of course, is that one does not end a quantum computation with an arbitrary superposition, but aims for a very special, ‘clever’ state—to use Pitowsky’s term. Quantum computations are not always efficiently classically simulable because the characterisation of the computational subspace of certain quantum states is difficult. Consequently, in the quantum circuit model one should count the number of computational steps in the computation not by counting the number of transformations of the state, but by counting the number of one- or two-qubit local transformations that are required to create the ‘clever’ superposition that ensures the desired speed-up. (Note that Shor’s algorithm, for example, involves three major steps in this context: First, one creates the ‘clever’ entangled state with a set of unitary transformations. The result of the computation—a global property of a function—is now ‘hidden’ in this state; second, in order to retrieve this result, one projects it on a subspace of the Hilbert space, and finally one performs another set of unitary transformations in order to make the result measurable in the original computational basis. All these steps count as computational steps as far as the efficiency of the algorithm is concerned. See also Bub 2006b.) The trick is to perform these local one- or two-qubit transformations in polynomial time, and it is likely that it is here where the physical power of quantum computing may be found.
The quantum information revolution has prompted discussion and debate (in which both physicists and philosophers have figured centrally) over what the rising new science can tell us about the foundations of quantum mechanics (see, e.g., Bub 2016; Bub & Pitowsky 2010; Chiribella & Spekkens 2016; Cuffaro 2020; Dunlap 2022; Duwell 2020; Felline 2016; Henderson 2020; Koberinski & Müller 2018; Janas, Cuffaro, & Janssen 2022; Myrvold 2010; Timpson 2013). To be sure (though see below), no resolution to the quantum measurement problem would seem to be forthcoming (see Felline 2020; Hagar 2003; Hagar & Hemmo 2006). But what the rise of the new science has motivated, some would argue, is a reconsideration of whether that is a problem worth solving at all. On “informational approaches” to the interpretation of quantum mechanics such as these (see Cuffaro 2023), quantum mechanics is seen as elevating something that we already know effectively constrains the practice of classical physics (Curiel 2020 [Other Internet Resources]) to the level of a postulate, namely, that interpreting the outcome of a measurement interaction as providing us with information about a given system of interest requires the specification of a schematic representation of an observer, minimally in terms of a “Boolean frame” within which one represents the answers to a set of yes-or-no questions associated with the system. On such a view, classical physics can be understood as a special case of this more general conception of a theory in which such a schematic representation adds no information that is not already contained, in principle, in a given system’s state description. That quantum mechanics is more general than this is the reason why, it is argued, it is able to represent correlational phenomena that cannot be represented efficiently in classical mechanics. And furthermore this ought to make us reconsider the usefulness for physics of the quest for a theory underlying quantum mechanics that satisfies our classical intuitions, such as that a “fundamental” theory of physics must solve the measurement problem.
Not all of the foundational work prompted by the rising science of quantum computing takes this attitude toward the measurement problem, and it is the hope of some that recent advances in the realisation of a large scale quantum computer may actually provide us with an empirical solution to it. As it turns out, collapse theories—one form of alternatives to quantum theory which aim to solve the measurement problem—modify Schrödinger’s equation and give different predictions from quantum theory in certain specific circumstances. These circumstances can be realised, moreover, if decoherence effects can be suppressed (Bassi, Adler, & Ippoliti 2004). Now one of the most difficult obstacles that await the construction of a large scale quantum computer is its robustness against decoherence effects (Unruh 1995). It thus appears that the technological capabilities required for the realisation of a large scale quantum computer are potentially related to those upon which the distinction between “true” and “false” collapse (Pearle 1997), i.e., between collapse theories and environmentally induced decoherence, is contingent. Consequently the physical realisation of a large-scale quantum computer, if it were of the right architecture, could potentially shed light on one of the long standing conceptual problems in the foundations of the theory, and if so this would serve as yet another example of experimental metaphysics (the term was coined by Abner Shimony to designate the chain of events that led from the EPR argument via Bell’s theorem to Aspect’s experiments). Note, however, that as just mentioned, one would need to consider the computer’s architecture before making any metaphysical conclusions. The computer architecture is important because while dynamical collapse theories tend to collapse superpositions involving the positions of macroscopic quantities of mass, they tend not to collapse large complicated superpositions of photon polarisation or spin.
5.3 Quantum Causality
Is quantum mechanics compatible with the principle of causality? This is an old question (Hermann 2017; Schlick 1961, 1962). In the contemporary literature there is considerable skepticism regarding the prospects of explaining quantum phenomena causally (Hausman & Woodward 1999; Woodward 2007), or at any rate locally causally, especially in the wake of Bell’s theorem (Myrvold 2016). Inspired by ideas very familiar to computer scientists, however, a strand in the physical and philosophical literature on causation has begun to reconsider whether the prospects for a locally causal explanation of quantum phenomena, at least in the context of an interventionist theory of causation, are quite as hopeless as they may initially have seemed (Adlam 2023; Allen, Barrett, Horsman, Lee, & Spekkens 2017; Costa & Shrapnel 2016; Lorenz 2022; Shrapnel 2017). This is not to say that decades of physical and philosophical investigations into the consequences of Bell’s theorem have all been mistaken, of course. For one thing, the interventionist frameworks utilised in this new work are operationalist, thus the relevance of this work to so-called hidden variables theories of quantum mechanics is unclear. Second, the interventionist frameworks utilised are not classical, and neither is the kind of causality they explicate. Indeed it is arguably the key insight emerging from this work that the frameworks previously utilised for analysing interventionist causation in the quantum context are inappropriate to that context. In contrast to a classical interventionist framework in which events are thought of as primitive (i.e. as not further analysable), events in these generalised frameworks are characterised as processes with associated inputs and outputs. Specifically, one characterises quantum events using a concept from quantum computation and information theory called a quantum channel. And within this generalised interventionist framework, causal models of quantum phenomena can be given which do not need to posit non-local causal influences, and which satisfy certain other desiderata typically required in a causal model (in particular that such a model respect the causal Markov condition and that it not require ‘fine-tuning’; see Shrapnel 2017).
5.4 (Quantum) Computational Perspectives on Physical Science
Physics is traditionally conceived as a primarily “theoretical” activity, in the sense that it is generally thought to be the goal of physics to tell us, even if only indirectly (Fuchs 2002, pp. 5–6), what the world is like independently of any considerations of purpose. This is not the case with every science. Chemistry, for example, is arguably best thought of as a “practically” oriented discipline concerned with the ways in which systems can be manipulated for particular purposes (Bensaude-Vincent 2009). Even within physics, there are sub-disciplines which are best construed in this way (Ladyman 2018; Myrvold 2011; Wallace 2014), and indeed some have even advocated that physics should be reconceptualised as the science of possible and impossible transformations (Deutsch 2013; Marletto 2022; Marletto et al. 2022).
Elaborating upon ideas which one can glean from Pitowsky’s work (1990, 1996, 2002), Cuffaro (2017, 2018a) argues that quantum computation and information theory (QCIT) are practical sciences in this sense, as opposed to the “theoretical sciences” exemplified by physics under its traditional characterisation; further that recognising this distinction illuminates both areas of activity. On the one hand, practical investigators attempting to isolate and/or quantify the computational resources made available by quantum computers are in danger of conceptual confusion if they are not cognisant of the differences between practical and traditional sciences. On the other hand, one should be wary of the significance of classical computer simulations of quantum mechanical phenomena for the purposes of a foundational analysis of the latter. For example, certain mathematical results can legitimately be thought of as no-go theorems for the purposes of a traditional foundational analysis, and yet are not really relevant for the purpose of characterising the class of efficiently simulable quantum phenomena.
5.5 The Church-Turing Thesis and Deutsch’s Principle
The Church-Turing thesis, which asserts that every function naturally regarded as computable is Turing-computable, is argued by Deutsch to presuppose a physical principle, namely that:
[DP]: Every finitely realisable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means. (Deutsch 1985)
Since no machine operating by finite means can simulate classical physics’ continuity of states and dynamics, Deutsch argues that DP is false in a classical world. He argues that it is true for quantum physics, however, owing to the existence of the universal quantum Turing machine he introduces in the same paper, which thus proves both DP and the Church-Turing thesis it underlies to be sound. This idea—that the Church-Turing thesis requires a physical grounding—is set into historical context by Lupacchini (2018), who traces its roots in the thought of Gödel, Post, and Gandy. It is criticised by Timpson (2013), who views it as methodologically fruitful, but as nevertheless resting on a confusion regarding the meaning of the Church-Turing thesis, which in itself has to do with the notion of an effective method and has nothing, per se, to do with physics (cf. Sprevak 2022).
5.6 (Quantum) Computation and Scientific Explanation
In the general philosophy of science literature on scientific explanation there is a distinction between so-called “how-actually” and “how-possibly” explanation, where the former aims to convey how a particular outcome actually came about, and the latter aims to convey how the occurrence of an event can have been possible. That how-actually explanation actually explains is uncontroversial, but the merit (if any) of how-possibly explanation has been debated. While some view how-possibly explanation as genuinely explanatory, others have argued that how-possibly ‘explanation’ is better thought of as, at best, a merely heuristically useful exercise.
It turns out that the science of quantum computation is able to illuminate this debate. Cuffaro (2015) argues that when one examines the question of the source of quantum speed-up, one sees that to answer this question is to compare algorithmic processes of various kinds, and in so doing to describe the possibility spaces associated with these processes. By doing so one explains how it is possible for one process to outperform its rival. Further, Cuffaro argues that in examples like this, once one has answered the how-possibly question, nothing is actually gained by subsequently asking a how-actually question.
5.7 Are There Computational Kinds?
Finally, another philosophical implication of the realisation of a large scale quantum computer regards the long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind on the autonomy of computational theories of the mind (Fodor 1974). In the shift from strong to weak artificial intelligence, the advocates of this view tried to impose constraints on computer programs before they could qualify as theories of cognitive science (Pylyshyn 1984). These constraints include, for example, the nature of physical realisations of symbols and the relations between abstract symbolic computations and the physical causal processes that execute them. The search for the computational feature of these theories, i.e., for what makes them computational theories of the mind, involved isolating some features of the computer as such. In other words, the advocates of weak AI were looking for computational properties, or kinds, that would be machine independent, at least in the sense that they would not be associated with the physical constitution of the computer, nor with the specific machine model that was being used. These features were thought to be instrumental in debates within cognitive science, e.g., the debates surrounding functionalism (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988).
Note, however, that once the physical Church-Turing thesis is violated, arguably some computational notions cease to be autonomous. In other words, given that quantum computers may be able to efficiently solve classically intractable problems, hence re-describe the abstract space of computational complexity (Bernstein & Vazirani 1997), computational concepts and even computational kinds such as ‘an efficient algorithm’ or ‘the class NP’, arguably become machine-dependent, and recourse to ‘hardware’ becomes inevitable in any analysis thereof (Cuffaro 2018b; Hagar 2007). Advances in quantum computing may thus militate against the functionalist view about the unphysical character of the types and properties that are used in computer science. Consequently, efficient quantum algorithms may serve as counterexamples to a-priori arguments against reductionism (Pitowsky 1996)—although the conceptual challenges to the physicalist version of that view would also seem to be non-trivial (Brown 2023). | |||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 58 | https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/algorithm.html | en | The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science | [
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/backgrounds/dcW.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pics/dog-lecture.jpg",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/notes_black.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/notes_black.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pics/gordon-moo... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | by Bernard Chazelle
hen the great Dane of 20th century physics, Niels Bohr, was not busy chewing on a juicy morsel of quantum mechanics, he was known to yap away witticisms worthy of Yogi Berra. The classic Bohrism “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” alas came too late to save Lord Kelvin. Just as physics was set to debut in Einstein's own production of Extreme Makeover, Kelvin judged the time ripe to pen the field's obituary: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” Not his lordship's finest hour.
Nor his worst. Aware that fallibility is the concession the genius makes to common mortals to keep them from despairing, Kelvin set early on to give the mortals much to be hopeful about. To wit, the thermodynamics pioneer devoted the first half of his life to studying hot air and the latter half to blowing it. Ever the perfectionist, he elevated to an art form the production of pure, unadulterated bunk: “X-rays will prove to be a hoax”; “Radio has no future”; “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”; and my personal favorite, “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” Kelvin's crystal ball was the gift that kept on giving.
“ Soon, my friends, you will look at a child's
homework — and see nothing to eat. ”
Gloat not at a genius' misfortunes. Futurologitis is an equal-opportunity affliction, one hardly confined to the physicist's ward. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” averred IBM Chairman, Thomas Watson, a gem of prescience matched only by a 1939 New York Times editorial: “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it.” The great demographer Thomas Malthus owes much of his fame to his loopy prediction that exponentially increasing populations would soon outrun the food supply. As the apprentice soothsayer learns in “Crystal Gazing 101,” never predict a geometric growth!
Apparently, Gordon Moore skipped that class. In 1965, the co-founder of semiconductor giant Intel announced his celebrated law: Computing power doubles every two years. Moore's Law has, if anything, erred on the conservative side. Every eighteen months, an enigmatic pagan ritual will see white-robed sorcerers silently shuffle into a temple dedicated to the god of cleanliness, and soon reemerge with, on their faces, a triumphant smile and, in their hands, a silicon wafer twice as densely packed as the day before. No commensurate growth in human mental powers has been observed: this has left us scratching our nonexpanding heads, wondering what it is we've done to deserve such luck.
To get a feel for the magic, consider that the latest Sony PlayStation would easily outpace the fastest supercomputer from the early nineties. If not for Moore's Law, the Information Superhighway would be a back alley to Snoozeville; the coolest thing about the computer would still be the blinking lights. And so, next time you ask who engineered the digital revolution, expect many hands to rise. But watch the long arm of Moore's Law tower above all others. Whatever your brand of high-tech addiction, be it IM, iPod, YouTube, or Xbox, be aware that you owe it first and foremost to the engineering wizardry that has sustained Moore's predictive prowess over the past forty years.
Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't. Within a few decades, say the optimists, a repeal is all but certain. Taking their cue from Bill Gates, the naysayers conjure up the curse of power dissipation, among other woes, to declare Moore's Law in the early stage of rigor mortis. Facing the bleak, sorrowful tomorrows of The Incredible Shrinking Chip That Won't Shrink No More, what's a computer scientist to do?
The rule of law
Break out the Dom and pop the corks, of course! Moore's Law has added fizz and sparkle to the computing cocktail, but for too long its exhilarating potency has distracted the party-goers from their Holy Grail quest: How to unleash the full computing and modeling power of the Algorithm. Not to stretch the metaphor past its snapping point, the temptation is there for the Algorithmistas (my tribe) to fancy themselves as the Knights of the Round Table and look down on Moore's Law as the Killer Rabbit, viciously elbowing King Arthur's intrepid algorithmic warriors. Just as an abundance of cheap oil has delayed the emergence of smart energy alternatives, Moore's Law has kept algorithms off center stage. Paradoxically, it has also been their enabler: the killer bunny turned sacrificial rabbit who sets the track champion on a world record pace, only to fade into oblivion once the trophy has been handed out. With the fading imminent, it is not too soon to ask why the Algorithm is destined to achieve celebrity status within the larger world of science. While you ask, let me boldly plant the flag and bellow the battle cry:
“The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
If you think such a blinding flare of hyperbole surely blazed right out of Lord Kelvin's crystal ball, read on and think again. A computer is a storyteller and algorithms are its tales. We'll get to the tales in a minute but, first, a few words about the storytelling.
Computing is the meeting point of three powerful concepts: universality, duality, and self-reference. In the modern era, this triumvirate has bowed to the class-conscious influence of the tractability creed. The creed's incessant call to complexity class warfare has, in turn, led to the emergence of that ultimate class leveler: the Algorithm. Today, not only is this new “order” empowering the e-technology that stealthily rules our lives; it is also challenging what we mean by knowing, believing, trusting, persuading, and learning. No less. Some say the Algorithm is poised to become the new New Math, the idiom of modern science. I say The Sciences They Are A-Changin' and the Algorithm is Here to Stay.
Reread the previous paragraph. If it still looks like a glorious goulash of blathering nonsense, good! I shall now explain, so buckle up!
The universal computer
Had Thomas Jefferson been a computer scientist, school children across the land would rise in the morning and chant these hallowed words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all computers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Universality and the separation of Data, Control, and Command.”
Computers come in different shapes, sizes, and colors, but all are created equal—indeed, much like 18th century white male American colonists. Whatever the world's fastest supercomputer can do (in 2006, that would be the IBM Blue Gene/L), your lowly iPod can do it, too, albeit a little more slowly. Where it counts, size doesn't matter: all computers are qualitatively the same. Even exotic beasts such as quantum computers, vector machines, DNA computers, and cellular automata can all be viewed as fancy iPods. That's universality!
The field of computing later
opened up to men
Here's how it works. Your iPod is a tripod (where did you think they got that name?), with three legs called control, program, and data. Together, the program and the data form the two sections of a document [program | data] that, to the untrained eye, resembles a giant, amorphous string of 0s and 1s. Something like this:
[ 1110001010110010010 | 1010111010101001110 ]
Each section has its own, distinct purpose: the program specifies instructions for the control to follow (eg, how to convert text into pdf); the data encodes plain information, like this essay (no, not plain in that sense). The data string is to be read, not to be read into. About it, Freud would have quipped: “Sometimes a string is just a string.” But he would have heard, seeping from the chambers of a program, the distant echoes of a dream: jumbled signs crying out for interpretation. To paraphrase the Talmudic saying, an uninterpreted program is like an unread letter. The beauty of the scheme is that the control need not know a thing about music. In fact, simply by downloading the appropriate program-data document, you can turn your iPod into: an earthquake simulator; a word processor; a web browser; or, if downloading is too much, a paperweight. Your dainty little MP3 player is a universal computer.
The control is the computer's brain and the sole link between program and data. Its only function in life is to read the data, interpret the program's orders, and act on them—a task so pedestrian that modern theory of reincarnation ranks the control as the lowest life form on the planet, right behind the inventor of the CD plastic wrap. If you smash your iPod open with a mallet and peek into its control, you'll discover what a marvel of electronics it is—okay, was. Even more marvelous is the fact that it need not be so. It takes little brainpower to follow orders blindly (in fact, too much tends to get in the way). Stretching this principle to the limit, one can design a universal computer with a control mechanism so simple that any old cuckoo clock will outsmart it. This begs the obvious question: did Orson Welles know that when he dissed the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks in “The Third Man”? It also raises a suspicion: doesn't the control need to add, multiply, divide, and do the sort of fancy footwork that would sorely test the nimblest of cuckoo clocks?
Alas, it still strikes the hours
No. The control on your laptop might indeed do all of those things, but the point is that it need not do so. (Just as a bank might give you a toaster when you open a new account, but it need not be a toaster; it could be a pet hamster.) Want to add? Write a program to add. Want to divide? Write a program to divide. Want to print? Write a program to print. A control that delegates all it can to the program's authority will get away with a mere two dozen different “states”—simplicity a cuckoo clock could only envy. If you want your computer to do something for you, don't just scream at the control: write down instructions in the program section. Want to catch trouts? Fine, append a fishing manual to the program string. The great nutritionist Confucius said it better: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The binary view of fishing = river + fisherman makes way for a universal one: fishing = river + fishing manual + you. Similarly,
computing = data + program + control.
This tripodal equation launched a scientific revolution, and it is to British mathematician Alan Turing that fell the honor of designing the launching pad. His genius was to let robots break out of the traditional binary brain-brawn mold, which conflates control and program, and embrace the liberating “tripod-iPod” view of computing. Adding a third leg to the robotic biped ushered in the era of universality: any computer could now simulate any other one.
Underpinning all of that, of course, was the digital representation of information: DVD vs VCR tape; piano vs violin; Anna Karenina vs Mona Lisa. The analog world of celluloid film and vinyl music is unfit for reproduction: doesn't die; just fades away. Quite the opposite, encoding information over an alphabet opens the door to unlimited, decay-free replication. In a universe of 0s and 1s, we catch a glimpse of immortality; we behold the gilded gates of eternity flung wide open by the bewitching magic of a lonely pair of incandescent symbols. In short, analog sucks, digital rocks.
Two sides of the same coin
Load your iPod with the program-data document [Print this | Print this]. Ready? Press the start button and watch the words “Print this” flash across the screen. Exciting, no? While you compose yourself with bated breath amid the gasps and the shrieks, take stock of what happened. To the unschooled novice, data and program may be identical strings, but to the cuckoo-like control they couldn't be more different: the data is no more than what it is; the program is no less than what it means. The control may choose to look at the string “Print this” either as a meaningless sequence of letters or as an order to commit ink to paper. To scan symbols mulishly or to deforest the land: that is the option at hand here—we call it duality.
So 1907, I almost hear you sigh. In that fateful year, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of linguistics, announced to a throng of admirers that there are two sides to a linguistic sign: its signifier (representation) and its signified (interpretation). A string is a sign that, under the watchful eye of the control, acts as signifier when data and as signified when a program.
Saussure's intellectual progeny is a breed of scholars known as semioticians. Funny that linguists, of all people, would choose for themselves a name that rhymes with mortician. Funny or not, semiotics mavens will point out the imperfect symmetry between program and data. The latter is inviolate. Signifiers must be treated with the utmost reverence: they could be passwords, hip-hop rhymes, or newfound biblical commandments. Mess with them at your own peril.
Programs are different. The encoding of the signified is wholly conventional. Take the program “Print this”, for example. A francophonic control would have no problem with “Imprimer ceci ” or, for that matter, with the obsequious “O, control highly esteemed, may you, noblest of cuckoos, indulge my impudent wish to see this humble string printed out, before my cup runneth over and your battery runneth out.” The plethora of programming languages reveals how so many ways there are of signifying the same thing. (Just as the plethora of political speeches reveals how so many ways there are of signifying nothing.)
Sensing the comic, artistic, and scholarly potential of the duality between program and data, great minds went to work. Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” routine is built around the confusion between a baseball player's nickname (the signifier) and the pronoun “who” (the signified). Magritte's celebrated painting “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe) plays on the distinction between the picture of a pipe (the signifier) and a pipe one smokes (the signified). The great painter might as well have scribbled on a blank canvas: “Le signifiant n'est pas le signifié ” (the signifier is not the signified). But he didn't, and for that we're all grateful.
English scholars are not spared the slings and arrows of duality either. How more dual can it get than the question that keeps Elizabethan lit gurus awake at night: “Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?” And pity the dually tormented soul that would dream up such wacky folderol: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Say it ain't true
I am lying. Really? Then I am lying when I say I am lying; therefore, I am not lying. Yikes. But if I am not lying then I am not lying when I say I am lying; therefore, I am lying. Double yikes. Not enough yet? Okay, consider the immortal quip of the great American philosopher Homer Simpson: “Oh Marge, cartoons don't have any deep meaning; they're just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh.” If cartoons don't have meaning, then Homer's statement is meaningless (not merely a philosopher, the man is a cartoon character); therefore, for all we know, cartoons have meaning. But then Homer's point is... Doh! Just say it ain't true. Ain't true? No, please, don't say it ain't true! Because if it ain't true then ain't true ain't true, and so...
AAARRRGGGHHH !!!!!!
Beware of self-referencing, that is to say, of sentences that make statements about themselves. Two of the finest mathematical minds in history, Cantor and Gödel, failed to heed that advice and both went stark raving bonkers. As the Viennese gentleman with the shawl-draped couch already knew, self-reference is the quickest route to irreversible dementia.
Escher's reproductive parts
It is also the salt of the computing earth. Load up your iPod, this time with the program-data document [Print this twice | Print this twice]. Push the start button and see the screen light up with the words: “Print this twice Print this twice”. Lo and behold, the thing prints itself! Well, not quite: the vertical bar is missing. To get everything right and put on fast track your career as a budding computer virus artist, try this instead: [Print this twice, starting with a vertical bar the second time | Print this twice, starting with a vertical bar the second time]. See how much better it works now! The key word in the self-printing business is “twice”: “never” would never work; “once” would be once too few; “thrice”?? Please watch your language.
Self-reproduction requires a tightly choreographed dance between: (i) a program explaining how to copy the data; (ii) a data string describing that very same program. By duality, the same sequence of words (or bits) is interpreted in two different ways; by self-reference, the duality coin looks the same on both sides. Self-reference—called recursion in computer parlance—requires duality; not the other way around. Which is why the universal computer owes its existence to duality and its power to recursion. If Moore's Law is the fuel of Google, recursion is its engine.
The tripodal view of computing was the major insight of Alan Turing—well, besides this little codebreaking thing he did in Bletchley Park that helped win World War II. Not to discount the lush choral voices of Princeton virtuosos Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, and John von Neumann, it is Maestro Turing who turned into a perfect opus the hitherto disjointed scores of the computing genre.
Mother Nature, of course, scooped them all by a few billion years. Your genome consists of two parallel strands of DNA that encode all of your genetic inheritance. Your morning addiction to Cocoa Puffs, your night cravings for Twinkies? Yep, it's all in there. Now if you take the two strands apart and line them up, you'll get two strings about three billion letters long. Check it out:
[ ACGGTATCCGAATGC... | TGCCATAGGCTTACG... ]
There they are: two twin siblings locking horns in a futile attempt to look different. Futile because if you flip the As into Ts and the Cs into Gs (and vice versa) you'll see each strand morph into the other one. The two strings are the same in disguise. So flip one of them to get a more symmetric layout. Like this:
[ ACGGTATCCGAATGC... | ACGGTATCCGAATGC... ]
Was I the only one to spot a suspicious similarity with [Print this twice | Print this twice] or did you, too? Both are program-data documents that provide perfectly yummy recipes for self-reproduction. Life's but a walking shadow, said Macbeth. Wrong. Life's but a self-printing iPod! Ministry-of-Virtue officials will bang on preachily about there being more to human life than the blind pursuit of self-replication, a silly notion that Hollywood's typical fare swats away daily at a theater near you. Existential angst aside, the string “ACGGTATCCGAATGC...” is either plain data (the genes constituting your DNA) or a program whose execution produces, among other things, all the proteins needed for DNA replication, plus all of the others needed for the far more demanding task of sustaining your Cocoa Puffs addiction. Duality is the choice you have to think of your genome either as a long polymer of nucleotides (the data to be read) or as the sequence of amino acids forming its associated proteins (the “programs of life”). Hence the fundamental equation of biology:
Life = Duality + Self-reference
“ Elementary, my dear Watson! ”
On April 25, 1953, the British journal Nature published a short article whose understated punchline was the shot heard 'round the world: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” In unveiling to the world the molecular structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick broke the Code of Life. In so doing, they laid bare the primordial link between life and computing. One can easily imagine the reaction of that other codebreaker from Bletchley Park: “Duality and self-reference embedded in molecules? Jolly good to know God thinks like me.”
Turing's swagger would have been forgivable. After all, here was the man who had invented the computer. Here was the man who had put the mind-matter question on a scientific footing. Here was the man who had saved Britain from defeat in 1941 by breaking the Nazi code. Alas, good deeds rarely go unpunished. In lieu of a knighthood, a grateful nation awarded Alan Turing a one-way ticket to Palookaville, England: a court conviction for homosexuality with a sentence of forced estrogen injections. On June 7, 1954, barely one year to the day of Watson and Crick's triumph, Alan Turing went home, ate an apple laced with cyanide, and died. His mother believed, as a mother would, that it was an accident.
The modern era
The post-Turing years saw the emergence of a new computing paradigm: tractability. Its origin lay in the intuitive notion that checking a proof of Archimedes's theorem can't be nearly as hard as finding it in the first place; enjoying a coke must be simpler than discovering its secret recipe (or so the Coca Cola Company hopes), falling under the spell of 'Round Midnight ought to be easier than matching Monk's composing prowess. But is it really? Amazingly, no one knows. Welcome to the foremost open question in all of computer science!
Ever wondered whether the 1,000-song library stored in your iPod could be reordered and split up to form two equal-time playlists? Probably not. But suppose you wanted to transfer your songs to the two sides of an extra-length cassette while indulging your lifelong passion for saving money on magnetic tape. Which songs would you put on which side so as to use as little tape as possible? Now you'd be wondering, wouldn't you? (Humor me: say yes.)
“First you prove it,
then you let it sink in.”
You wouldn't wonder long, anyway. After a minute's reflection, you'd realize you didn't have the faintest idea how to do that. (Warning: splitting a tune in the middle is a no-no.) Of course, you could try all possibilities but that's a big number—roughly 1 followed by 300 zeroes. Ah, but your amazing friend Alice, she knows! Or so she says. Then why not just get the two playlists from her? By adding up a few numbers, you'll easily verify that she's not lying and that, indeed, both lists have the same playing time. What Alice will hand you over is, in essence, a proof that your song library can be split evenly. Your job will be reduced to that of proof-checking, a task at which a compulsive tape-saving Scrooge might even shine. Heads-up: did you notice my nonchalant use of the word “lying”? When a movie's opening scene casually trains the camera on a gun, no one might get hurt for a while, but you know that won't last.
Alas, wondrous Alice fell down the rabbit hole eons ago and, these days, a good library splitting friend is hard to find. And so, sadly, you'll have little choice but to compile the two lists yourself and engage in that dreaded thing called proof-finding. That's a tougher nut to crack. So much so that even if you were to harness the full power of an IBM Blue Gene/L running the best software available anywhere on earth and beyond, the entire lifetime of the universe wouldn't be enough! You might get lucky with the parameters and get it done sooner, but getting lucky? Yeah, right...
To add insult to injury, computer scientists have catalogued thousands of such Jurassic problems—so named for the dinosaur-like quality of their solutions: hard to discover but impossible to miss when they pop up in front of you; in other words, proofs hopelessly difficult to find but a breeze to verify. Courtesy of Murphy's Law, of course, the great Jurassics of the world include all of the hydra-headed monsters we're so desperate to slay: drug design; protein folding; resource allocation; portfolio optimization; suitcase packing; etc. Furthermore, even shooting for good approximate solutions—when the notion makes sense—can sometimes be just as daunting.
Now a funny thing happened on the way back from the word factory. Despite its dazzling lyricism, metaphorical felicity, hip-hoppish élan, not to mention a Niagara of adulatory gushing I'll kindly spare you, my staggeringly brilliant coinage “Jurassic” hasn't caught on. Yet. Skittish computer scientists tend to favor the achingly dull “NP-complete.” Worse, their idea of bustin' a dope, def funky rhyme is to—get this—write down the thing in full, as in “complete for nondeterministic polynomial time.” To each their own.
Back to the Jurassics. Always basking in the spotlight, they are famously difficult, impossibly hard to satisfy, and—if their resilience is any guide—quite pleased with the attention. These traits often run in the family; sure enough, the Jurassics are blood kin. The first to put them on the analyst's couch and pin their intractable behavior on consanguinity were Stephen Cook, Jack Edmonds, Richard Karp, and Leonid Levin. In the process they redefined computing around the notion of tractability and produced the most influential milestone in post-Turing computer science.
But what is a tractable problem, you ask? Answer: one that can be solved in polynomial time. Oh, swell; nothing like calling upon the opaque to come to the rescue of the obscure! Relax: it's quite simple, really. If you double the size of the problem—say, your iPod library will now hold 2,000 tunes instead of a mere 1,000—then the time to find an even split should at most double, or quadruple, or increase by some fixed rate (ie, independent of the problem size). That's what it means to be tractable. Convoluted as this definition may seem, it has two things going for it: one is to match our intuition of what can be solved in practice (assuming the fixed rate isn't “fixed” too high); the other is to leave the particular computer we're working on out of the picture. See how there is no mention of computing speeds; only of growth rates. It is a statement about software, not hardware. Tractability is a universal attribute of a problem—or lack thereof. Note: some scholars prefer the word feasibility. Obviously, to resist the lure of the opening riff of Wittgenstein's “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” takes willpower; predictably, the feasibility crowd is thin.
“ What do you mean, ‘intractable’ ? ”
Library splitting does not appear to be tractable. (Hold the tears: you'll need them in a minute.) Any algorithm humans have ever tried—and many have—requires exponential time. Read: all of them share the dubious distinction that their running times get squared (not merely scaled up by a constant factor) whenever one doubles the size of the problem. If you do the math, you'll see it's the sort of growth that quickly gets out of hand.
Well, do the math. Say you want to solve a problem that involves 100 numbers and the best method in existence takes one second on your laptop. How long would it take to solve the same problem with 200 numbers, instead? Answer: just a few seconds if it's tractable; and C× 2200 = (C× 2100)2100 = 2100 seconds if it's not. That's more than a billion trillion years! To paraphrase Senator Dirksen from the great State of Illinois, a trillion years here, a trillion years there, and pretty soon you're talking real time. Exponentialitis is not a pretty condition. Sadly, it afflicts the entire Jurassic menagerie.
The true nature of the ailment eludes us but this much we know: it's genetic. If any one of the Jurassics is tractable, wonder of wonders, all of them are. Better still: a cure for any one of them could easily be used to heal any of the others. Viewed through the tractability lens, the Jurassics are the same T. rex in different brontosaurus' clothings. Heady stuff! The day Alice can split your song library within a few hours will be the day biologists can fold proteins over breakfast, design new drugs by lunch, and eradicate deadly diseases just in time for dinner. The attendant medical revolution will likely make you live the long, jolly life of a giant Galápagos tortoise (life span: 150 years). Alice's discovery would imply the tractability of all the Jurassics (P=NP in computer lingo). Should the computing gods smile upon us, the practical consequences could be huge.
Granted, there would be a few losers: mostly online shoppers and mathematicians. All commercial transactions on the Internet would cease to be secure and e-business would grind to a halt. (More on this gripping drama in the next section.) The math world would take a hit, too: P=NP would prove Andrew Wiles, the conqueror of Fermat's Last Theorem, no more deserving of credit than his referee. Well, not quite. Mathematicians like to assign two purposes to a proof: one is to convince them that something is true; the other is to help them understand why something is true. Tractability bears no relevance to the latter. Still, no one wants to see friendly mathematicians swell the ranks of the unemployed as they get replaced by nano iPods, so the consensus has emerged that P is not NP. There are other reasons, too, but that one is the best because it puts computer scientists in a good light. The truth is, no one has a clue.
To be P or not to be P, that is NP's question. A million-dollar question, in fact. That's how much prize money the Clay Mathematics Institute will award Alice if she resolves the tractability of library splitting. (She will also be shipped to Guantánamo by the CIA, but that's a different essay.) Which side of the NP question should we root for? We know the stakes: a short existence blessed with online shopping (P≠NP); or the interminable, eBay-less life of a giant tortoise (P=NP). Tough call.
P=NP (Or why you won't find the proof on eBay)
An algorithm proving P=NP might conceivably do for technology what the discovery of the wheel did for land transportation. Granted, to discover the wheel is always nice, but to roll logs in the mud has its charms, too. Likewise, the intractability of proof-finding would have its benefits. That 1951 vintage Wham-O hula hoop you bought on eBay the other day, er, you didn't think the auction was secure just because online thieves were too hip for hula hoops, did you? What kept them at bay was the (much hoped-for) intractability of integer factorization.
Say what? Prime numbers deterring crooks? Indeed. Take two primes, S and T, each one, say, a thousand-digit long. The product R= S × T is about 2,000 digits long. Given S and T, your laptop will churn out R in a flash. On the other hand, if you knew only R, how hard would it be for you to retrieve S and T? Hard. Very hard. Very very hard. Repeat this until you believe it because the same algorithm that would find S and T could be used to steal your credit card off the Internet!
Cryptology will help you
win wars and shop online
Am I implying that computer security is premised on our inability to do some silly arithmetic fast enough? I surely am. If the Jurassics were shown to be tractable, not a single computer security system would be safe. Which is why for eBay to auction off a proof of P=NP would be suicidal. Worse: factoring is not even known—or, for that matter, thought—to be one of the Jurassics. It could well be a cuddly pet dinosaur eager to please its master (if only its master had the brains to see that). One cannot rule out the existence of a fast factoring algorithm that would have no incidence on the P=NP question.
In fact, such an algorithm exists. All of the recent hoopla about quantum computing owes to the collective panic caused by Peter Shor's discovery that factoring is tractable on a quantum iPod. That building the thing itself is proving quite hopeless has helped to calm the frayed nerves of computer security experts. And yet there remains the spine-chilling possibility that maybe, just maybe, factoring is doable in practice on a humble laptop. Paranoid security pros might want to hold on to their prozac a while longer.
Cryptology is a two-faced Janus. One side studies how to decrypt the secret messages that bad people exchange among one another. That's cryptanalysis: think Nazi code, Bletchley Park, victory parade, streamers, confetti, sex, booze, and rock 'n' roll. The other branch of the field, cryptography, seeks clever ways of encoding secret messages for good people to send to other good people, so that bad people get denied the streamers, the confetti, and all the rest. Much of computer security relies on public-key cryptography. The idea is for, say, eBay to post an encryption algorithm on the web that everybody can use. When you are ready to purchase that hula hoop, you'll type in your credit card information into your computer, encrypt it right there, and then send the resulting gobbledygook over the Internet. Naturally, the folks at eBay will need their own secret decryption algorithm to make sense of the junk they'll receive from you. (Whereas poor taste is all you'll need to make sense of the junk you'll receive from them.) The punchline is that no one should be able to decrypt anything unless they have that secret algorithm in their possession.
“Remember, guys, not a word about
our factoring algorithm, okay? ”
Easier said than done. Consider the fiendishly clever algorithm that encodes the first two words of this sentence as dpotjefs uif. So easy to encrypt: just replace each letter in the text by the next one in the alphabet. Now assume you knew this encryption scheme. How in the world would you go about decrypting a message? Ah, this is where algorithmic genius kicks in. (Algorithmistas get paid the big bucks for a reason.) It's a bit technical so I'll write slowly: replace each letter in the ciphertext by the previous one in the alphabet. Ingenious, no? And fast, too! The only problem with the system is that superior minds can crack it. So is there a cryptographic scheme that is unbreakable, irrespective of how many geniuses roam the earth? It should be child's play to go one way (encrypt) but a gargantuan undertaking to go back (decrypt)—unless, that is, one knows the decryption algorithm, in which case it should be a cinch.
RSA, named after Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman, is just such a scheme. It's an exceedingly clever, elegant public-key cryptosystem that, amazingly, requires only multiplication and long division. It rules e-commerce and pops up in countless security applications. Its universal acclaim got its inventors the Turing award (the “Nobel prize” of computer science). More important, it got Rivest a chance to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the first Red Sox-Yankees game of the 2004 season. Yes, RSA is that big! There is one catch, though (pun intended): if factoring proves to be tractable then it's bye-bye RSA, hello shopping mall.
The computational art of persuasion
Isn't intractability just a variant of undecidability, the mother's milk of logicians? One notion evokes billions of years, the other eternity—what's the difference? Whether the execution of [program | data] ever terminates is undecidable. In other words, one cannot hope to find out by writing another program and reading the output of [another program | [program | data]]. Of side interest, note how the whole document [program | data] is now treated as mere data: an artful cadenza from Maestro Turing.
Very nice, but how's undecidability helping us go through life with a smile on our face? It doesn't. In fact, no one ever tried to benefit from an undecidable problem who didn't wind up slouched face down on the Viennese gentleman's couch. Not so with intractable problems. Just as quantum mechanics shattered the platonic view of a reality amenable to noninvasive observation, tractability has clobbered classical notions of identity, randomness, and knowledge. And that's a good thing.
Why? Let me hereby declare two objects to be “identical” if to tell them apart is intractable, regardless of how different they might actually be. A deck of cards will be “perfectly” shuffled if it's impossible to prove it otherwise in polynomial time. It is one of the sweet ironies of computing that the existence of an intractable world out there makes our life down here so much easier. Think of it as the Olympics in reverse: if you can't run the 100-meter dash under 10 seconds, you win the gold!
Scientists of all stripes are insatiable consumers of random numbers: try taking a poll, conducting clinical trials, or running a lottery without them! To produce randomness can be quite arduous. To this day, only two methods have been scientifically validated. One of them is the infamous “Kitty Flop.” Strap buttered toast to the back of a cat and drop the animal from a PETA-approved height: if the butter hits the ground, record a 1; else a 0. For more bits, repeat. Randomness results from the tension between Murphy's law and the feline penchant for landing on one's feet. The other method is the classical “Coriolis Flush.” This time, go to the equator and flush the toilet: if the water whirls clockwise, your random bit is a 1; else it's a 0.
Now think how much easier it'd be if cheating were allowed. Not even bad plumbing could stop you (though many hope it would). Okay, your numbers are not truly random and your cards are not properly shuffled, but if to show they are not is intractable then why should you care? Hardness creates easiness. Of course, computer scientists have simply rediscovered what professional cyclists have known for years: the irresistible lure of intractability (of drug detection).
You're not thinking, I hope, that this is all perched on the same moral high ground as Don Corleone's philosophy that crime is not breaking the law but getting caught. If you are, will you please learn to think positive? Our take on intractability is really no different from the 1894 Supreme Court decision in Coffin vs US that introduced to American jurisprudence the maxim “Innocent until proven guilty.” Reality is not what is but what can be proven to be (with bounded patience). If you think this sort of tractability-induced relativism takes us down the garden path, think again. It actually cleanses classical notions of serious defects.
Take knowledge, for example: here's something far more faith-based than we'd like to admit. We “know” that the speed of light is constant, but who among us has actually bothered to measure it? We know because we trust. Not all of us have that luxury. Say you're a fugitive from the law. (Yes, I know, your favorite metaphor.) The authorities don't trust you much and—one can safely assume—the feeling is mutual. How then can you convince the police of your innocence? Reveal too little and they won't believe you. Reveal too much and they'll catch you. Intractability holds the key to the answer. And the Feds hold the key to my prison cell if I say more. Sorry, nothing to see here, move along.
Fresh, juicy primes!
Years have passed and you've traded your fugitive's garb for the funky duds of a math genius who's discovered how to factor integers in a flash. Sniffing a business opportunity, you offer to factor anybody's favorite number for a small fee. There might be a huge market for that, but it's less clear there's nearly enough gullibility around for anyone to take you up on your offer—especially with your mugshot still hanging in the post office. No one is likely to cough up any cash unless they can see the prime factors. But then why would you reward such distrust by revealing the factors in the first place? Obviously, some confidence-building is in order.
What will do the trick is a dialogue between you and the buyer that persuades her that you know the factors, all the while leaking no information about them whatsoever. Amazingly, such an unlikely dialogue exists: for this and, in fact, for any of our Jurassics. Alice can convince you that she can split up your iPod library evenly without dropping the slightest hint about how to do it. (A technical aside: this requires a slightly stronger intractability assumption than P≠NP.) Say hello to the great zero-knowledge (ZK) paradox: a congenital liar can convince a hardened skeptic that she knows something without revealing a thing about it. ZK dialogues leave no option but for liars to tell the truth and for doubting Thomases to believe. They render dishonesty irrelevant, for trusting comes naturally to a society where all liars get caught.
What's intractability got to do with it? Everything. If factoring were known to be tractable, the buyer would need no evidence that you could factor: she could just do it herself and ignore your services—bakers don't buy bread. At this point, the reader might have a nagging suspicion of defective logic: if factoring is so hard, then who's going to be the seller? Superman? In e-commerce applications, numbers to be factored are formed by multiplying huge primes together. In this way, the factors are known ahead of time to those privy to this process and live in intractability limboland for all others.
The book of zero-knowledge
It gets better. Not only can two parties convince each other of their respective knowledge without leaking any of it; they can also reason about it. Two businessmen get stuck in an elevator. Naturally, a single thought runs through their minds: finding out who's the wealthier. Thanks to ZK theory, they'll be able to do so without revealing anything about their own worth (material worth, that is—the other kind is already in full view).
Feel the pain of two nuclear powers, Learsiland and Aidniland. Not being signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only they know the exact size of their nuclear arsenals (at least one hopes they do). Computing theory would allow Learsiland to prove to Aidniland that it outnukes it without leaking any information about its deterrent's strength. The case of Nariland is more complex: it only wishes to demonstrate compliance with the NPT (which it's signed) without revealing any information about its nuclear facilities. While these questions are still open, they are right up ZK 's alley. Game theorists made quite a name for themselves in the Cold War by explaining why the aptly named MAD strategy of nuclear deterrence was not quite as mad as it sounded. Expect zero-knowledgists to take up equally daunting “doomsday” challenges in the years ahead. And, when they do, get yourself a large supply of milk and cookies, a copy of Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling,” and unrestricted access to a deep cave.
More amazing than ZK still is this thing called PCP (for “probabilistically checkable proofs; not for what you think). For a taste of it, consider the sociological oddity that great unsolved math problems seem to attract crackpots like flypaper. Say I am one of them. One day I call the folks over at the Clay Math Institute to inform them that I've just cracked the Riemann hypothesis (the biggest baddest beast in the math jungle). And could they please deposit my million-dollar check into my Nigerian account presto? Being the gracious sort, Landon and Lavinia Clay indulge me with a comforting “Sure,” while adding the perfunctory plea: “As you know, we're a little fussy about the format of our math proofs. So please make sure yours conforms to our standards—instructions available on our web site, blah, blah.” To my relief, that proves quite easy—even with that damn caps lock key stuck in the down position—and the new proof is barely longer than the old one. Over at Clay headquarters, meanwhile, no one has any illusions about me (fools!) but, bless the lawyers, they're obligated to verify the validity of my proof.
“Gotta run. Let's try PCP ! ”
To do that, they've figured out an amazing way, the PCP way. It goes like this: Mr and Mrs Clay will pick four characters from my proof at random and throw the rest in the garbage without even looking at it. They will then assemble the characters into a four-letter word and read it out loud very slowly—it's not broadcast on American TV, so it's okay. Finally, based on that word alone, they will declare my proof valid or bogus. The kicker: their conclusion will be correct! Granted, there's a tiny chance of error due to the use of random numbers, but by repeating this little game a few times they can make a screwup less likely than having their favorite baboon type all of Hamlet in perfect Mandarin.
At this point, no doubt you're wondering whether to believe this mumbo-jumbo might require not only applying PCP but also smoking it. If my proof is correct, I can see how running it through the Clays' gauntlet of checks and tests would leave it unscathed. But, based on a lonely four-letter word, how will they know I've cracked Riemann's hypothesis and not a baby cousin, like the Riemann hypothesis for function fields, or a baby cousin's baby cousin like 1+1=2? If my proof is bogus (perish the thought) then their task seems equally hopeless. Presumably, the formatting instructions are meant to smear any bug across the proof so as to corrupt any four letters picked at random. But how can they be sure that, in order to evade their dragnet, I haven't played fast and loose with their silly formatting rules? Crackpots armed with all-caps keyboards will do the darndest thing. Poor Mr and Mrs Clay! They must check not only my math but also my abidance by the rules. So many ways to cheat, so few things to check.
When Abu's light was
shining on Baghdad
PCP is the ultimate lie-busting device. Why ultimate? Because it is instantaneous and foolproof. The time-honored approach to truth finding is the court trial, where endless questioning between two parties, each one with good reasons to lie, leads to the truth or to a mistrial, but never to an erroneous judgment (yes, I know). PCP introduces the instant-trial system. Once the case has been brought before the judge, it is decided on the spot after only a few seconds of cross-examination. Justice is fully served; and yet the judge will go back to her chamber utterly clueless as to what the case was about. PCP is one of the most amazing algorithms of our time. It steals philosophy's thunder by turning on its head basic notions of evidence, persuasion, and trust. Somewhere, somehow, Ludwig the Tractatus Man is smiling.
To say that we're nowhere near resolving P vs NP is a safe prophecy. But why? There are few mysteries in life that human stupidity cannot account for, but to blame the P=NP conundrum on the unbearable lightness of our addled brains would be a cop-out. Better to point the finger at the untamed power of the Algorithm—which, despite rumors to the contrary, was not named after Al Gore but after Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. As ZK and PCP demonstrate, tractability reaches far beyond the racetrack where computing competes for speed. It literally forces us to think differently. The agent of change is the ubiquitous Algorithm. Let's look over the horizon where its disruptive force beckons, shall we?
Thinking algorithmically
Algorithms are often compared to recipes. As clichés go, a little shopworn perhaps, but remember: no metaphor that appeals to one's stomach can be truly bad. Furthermore, the literary analogy is spot-on. Algorithms are—and should be understood as—works of literature. The simplest ones are short vignettes that loop through a trivial algebraic calculation to paint fractals, those complex, pointillistic pictures much in vogue in the sci-fi movie industry. Just a few lines long, these computing zingers will print the transcendental digits of π, sort huge sets of numbers, model dynamical systems, or tell you on which day of the week your 150th birthday will fall (something whose relevance we've already covered). Zingers can do everything. For the rest, we have, one notch up on the sophistication scale, the sonnets, ballads, and novellas of the algorithmic world. Hiding behind their drab acronyms, of which RSA, FFT, SVD, LLL, AKS, KMP, and SVM form but a small sample, these marvels of ingenuity are the engines driving the algorithmic revolution currently underway. (And, yes, you may be forgiven for thinking that a computer geek's idea of culinary heaven is a nice big bowl of alphabet soup.) At the rarefied end of the literary range, we find the lush, complex, multilayered novels. The Algorithmistas' pride and joy, they are the big, glorious tomes on the coffee table that everyone talks about but only the fearless read.
“ ‘ fetch branch push load store jump fetch... ’
Who writes this crap? ”
Give it to them, algorithmic zingers know how to make a scientist swoon. No one who's ever tried to calculate the digits of π by hand can remain unmoved at the sight of its decimal expansion flooding a computer screen like lava flowing down a volcano. Less impressive perhaps but just as useful is this deceptively simple data retrieval technique called binary search, or BS for short. Whenever you look up a friend's name in the phone book, chances are you're using a variant of BS—unless you're the patient type who prefers exhaustive search (ES) and finds joy in combing through the directory alphabetically till luck strikes. Binary search is exponentially (ie, incomparably) faster than ES. If someone told you to open the phone book in the middle and check whether the name is in the first or second half; then ordered you to repeat the same operation in the relevant half and go on like that until you spotted your friend's name, you would shoot back: “That's BS!”
Well, yes and no. Say your phone book had a million entries and each step took one second: BS would take only twenty seconds but ES would typically run for five days! Five days?! Imagine that. What if it were an emergency and you had to look up the number for 911? (Yep, there's no low to which this writer won't stoop.) The key to binary search is to have an ordered list. To appreciate the relevance of sorting, suppose that you forgot the name of your friend (okay, acquaintance) but you had her number. Since the phone numbers typically appear in quasi-random order, the name could just be anywhere and you'd be stuck with ES. There would be two ways for you to get around this: to be the famous Thomas Magnum and bribe the Honolulu police chief to get your hands on the reverse directory; or to use something called a hash table: a key idea of computer science.
Hash table? Hmm, I know what you're thinking: Algorithmistas dig hash tables; they're down for PCP; they crack codes; they get bent out of shape by morphin'; they swear by quicksnort (or whatever it's called). Coincidence? Computer scientists will say yes, but what else are they supposed to say?
Algorithms for searching the phone book or spewing out the digits of π are race horses: their sole function is to run fast and obey their masters. Breeding Triple Crown winners has been high on computer science's agenda—too high, some will say. Blame this on the sheer exhilaration of the sport. Algorithmic racing champs are creatures of dazzling beauty, and a chance to breed them is a rare privilege. That said, whizzing around the track at lightning speed is not the be-all and end-all of algorithmic life. Creating magic tricks is just as highly prized: remember RSA, PCP, ZK. The phenomenal rise of Google's fortunes owes to a single algorithmic gem, PageRank, leavened by the investing exuberance of legions of believers. To make sense of the World Wide Web is algorithmic in a qualitative sense. Speed is a secondary issue. And so PageRank, itself no slouch on the track, is treasured for its brains, not its legs.
Hold on! To make sense of the world, we have math. Who needs algorithms? It is beyond dispute that the dizzying success of 20th century science is, to a large degree, the triumph of mathematics. A page's worth of math formulas is enough to explain most of the physical phenomena around us: why things fly, fall, float, gravitate, radiate, blow up, etc. As Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Granted, Einstein's assurance that something is comprehensible might not necessarily reassure everyone, but all would agree that the universe speaks in one tongue and one tongue only: mathematics.
“Don't google us, we'll google you.”
But does it, really? This consensus is being challenged today. As young minds turn to the sciences of the new century with stars in their eyes, they're finding old math wanting. Biologists have by now a pretty good idea of what a cell looks like, but they've had trouble figuring out the magical equations that will explain what it does. How the brain works is a mystery (or sometimes, as in the case of our 43rd president, an overstatement) whose long, dark veil mathematics has failed to lift.
Economists are a refreshingly humble lot—quite a surprise really, considering how little they have to be humble about. Their unfailing predictions are rooted in the holy verities of higher math. True to form, they'll sheepishly admit that this sacred bond comes with the requisite assumption that economic agents, also known as humans, are benighted, robotic dodos—something which unfortunately is not always true, even among economists.
A consensus is emerging that, this time around, throwing more differential equations at the problems won't cut it. Mathematics shines in domains replete with symmetry, regularity, periodicity—things often missing in the life and social sciences. Contrast a crystal structure (grist for algebra's mill) with the World Wide Web (cannon fodder for algorithms). No math formula will ever model whole biological organisms, economies, ecologies, or large, live networks. Will the Algorithm come to the rescue? This is the next great hope. The algorithmic lens on science is full of promise—and pitfalls.
First, the promise. If you squint hard enough, a network of autonomous agents interacting together will begin to look like a giant distributed algorithm in action. Proteins respond to local stimuli to keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing, and your eyes glued to this essay—how more algorithmic can anything get? The concomitance of local actions and reactions yielding large-scale effects is a characteristic trait of an algorithm. It would be naive to expect mere formulas like those governing the cycles of the moon to explain the cycles of the cell or of the stock market.
Contrarians will voice the objection that an algorithm is just a math formula in disguise, so what's the big hoopla about? The answer is: yes, so what? The issue here is not logical equivalence but expressibility. Technically, number theory is just a branch of set theory, but no one thinks like that because it's not helpful. Similarly, the algorithmic paradigm is not about what but how to think. The issue of expressiveness is subtle but crucial: it leads to the key notion of abstraction and is worth a few words here (and a few books elsewhere).
Remember the evil Brazilian butterfly? Yes, the one that idles the time away by casting typhoons upon China with the flap of a wing. This is the stuff of legend and tall tales (also known as chaos theory). Simple, zinger-like algorithms model this sort of phenomenon while neatly capturing one of the tenets of computing: the capacity of a local action to unleash colossal forces on a global scale; complexity emerging out of triviality.
Al-Khwarizmi takes wing
Create a virtual aviary of simulated geese and endow each bird with a handful of simple rules: (1) Spot a flock of geese? Follow its perceived center; (2) Get too close to a goose? Step aside; (3) Get your view blocked by another goose? Move laterally away from it; etc. Release a hundred of these critters into the (virtual) wild and watch a distributed algorithm come to life, as a flock of graceful geese migrate in perfect formation. Even trivial rules can produce self-organizing systems with patterns of behavior that look almost “intelligent.” Astonishingly, the simplest of algorithms mediate that sort of magic.
The local rules of trivial zingers carry enough punch to produce complex systems; in fact, by Church-Turing universality, to produce any complex system. Obviously, not even algorithmic sonnets, novellas, or Homeric epics can beat that. So why bother with the distinction? Perhaps for the same reason the snobs among us are loath to blur the difference between Jay Leno and Leo Tolstoy. But isn't “War and Peace” just an endless collection of one-liners? Not quite. The subtlety here is called abstraction. Train your binoculars on a single (virtual) goose in flight and you'll see a bird-brained, rule-driven robot flying over Dullsville airspace. Zoom out and you'll be treated to a majestic flock of birds flying in formation. Abstraction is the ability to choose the zoom factor. Algorithmic novels allow a plethora of abstraction levels that are entirely alien to zingers.
Take war, for example. At its most basic, war is a soldier valiantly following combat rules on the battlefield. At a higher level of abstraction, it is a clash of warfare strategies. Mindful of Wellington's dictum that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (where they take their pillow fighting seriously), one might concentrate instead on the schooling of the officer corps. Clausewitz devotees who see war as politics by other means will adjust the zoom lens to focus on the political landscape. Abstraction can be vertical: a young English infantryman within a platoon within a company within a battalion within a regiment within a mass grave on the banks of the Somme.
Or it can be horizontal: heterogeneous units interacting together within an algorithmic “ecology.” Unlike zingers, algorithmic novels are complex systems in and of themselves. Whereas most of what a zinger does contributes directly to its output, the epics of the algorithmic world devote most of their energies to servicing their constituent parts via swarms of intricate data structures. Most of these typically serve functions that bear no direct relevance to the algorithm's overall purpose—just as the mRNA of a computer programmer rarely concerns itself with the faster production of Java code.
The parallel with biological organisms is compelling but far from understood. To this day, for example, genetics remains the art of writing the captions for a giant cartoon strip. Molecular snapshots segue from one scene to the next through plots narrated by circuit-like chemical constructs—zingers, really—that embody only the most rudimentary notions of abstraction. Self-reference is associated mostly with self-replication. In the algorithmic world, by contrast, it is the engine powering the complex recursive designs that give abstraction its amazing richness: it is, in fact, the very essence of computing. Should even a fraction of that power be harnessed for modeling purposes in systems biology, neuroscience, economics, or behavioral ecology, there's no telling what might happen (admittedly, always a safe thing to say). To borrow the Kuhn cliché, algorithmic thinking could well cause a paradigm shift. Whether the paradigm shifts, shuffles, sashays, or boogies its way into the sciences, it seems destined to make a lasting imprint.
Had Newton been hit by a flying
goose and not a falling apple...
Now the pitfalls. What could disrupt the rosy scenario we so joyfully scripted? The future of the Algorithm as a modeling device is not in doubt. For its revolutionary impact to be felt in full, however, something else needs to happen. Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? You're the unreconstructed Algorithm skeptic. Fresh from splitting your playlist, Alice, naturally, is the advocate. One day, she comes to you with a twinkle in her eye and a question on her mind: “What are the benefits of the central law of mechanics?” After a quick trip to Wikipedia to reactivate your high school physics neurons and dust off the cobwebs around them, you reply that F=ma does a decent job of modeling the motion of an apple as it is about to crash on Newton's head: “What's not to like about that?” “Oh, nothing,” retorts Alice, “except that algorithms can be faithful modelers, too; they're great for conducting simulations and making predictions.” Pouncing for the kill, she adds: “By the way, to be of any use, your vaunted formulas will first need to be converted into algorithms.” Touché.
Ahead on points, Alice's position will dramatically unravel the minute you remind her that F=ma lives in the world of calculus, which means that the full power of analysis and algebra can be brought to bear. From F=ma, for example, one finds that: (i) the force doubles when the mass does; (ii) courtesy of the law of gravity, the apple's position is a quadratic function of time; (iii) the invariance of Maxwell's equations under constant motion kills F=ma and begets the theory of special relativity. And all of this is done with math alone! Wish Alice good luck trying to get her beloved algorithms to pull that kind of stunt. Math gives us the tools for doing physics; more important, it gives us the tools for doing math. We get not only the equations but also the tools for modifying, combining, harmonizing, generalizing them; in short, for reasoning about them. We get the characters of the drama as well as the whole script!
Is there any hope for a “calculus” of algorithms that would enable us to knead them like Play-Doh to form new algorithmic shapes from old ones? Algebraic geometry tells us what happens when we throw in a bunch of polynomial equations together. What theory will tell us what happens when we throw in a bunch of algorithms together? As long as they remain isolated, free-floating creatures, hatched on individual whims for the sole purpose of dispatching the next quacking duck flailing in the open-problems covey, algorithms will be parts without a whole; and the promise of the Algorithm will remain a promise deferred.
While the magic of algorithms has long held computing theorists in its thrall, their potential power has been chronically underestimated; it's been the life story of the field, in fact, that they are found to do one day what no one thought them capable of doing the day before. If proving limitations on algorithms has been so hard, maybe it's because they can do so much. Algorithmistas will likely need their own “Google Earth” to navigate the treacherous canyons of Turingstan and find their way to the lush oases amid the wilderness. But mark my words: the algorithmic land will prove as fertile as the one the Pilgrims found in New England and its settlement as revolutionary.
Truth be told, the 1776 of computing is not quite upon us. If the Algorithm is the New World, we are still building the landing dock at Plymouth Rock. Until we chart out the vast expanses of the algorithmic frontier, the P vs NP mystery is likely to remain just that. Only when the Algorithm becomes not just a body but a way of thinking, the young sciences of the new century will cease to be the hapless nails that the hammer of old math keeps hitting with maniacal glee.
One thing is certain. Moore's Law has put computing on the map: the Algorithm will now unleash its true potential. That's one prediction Lord Kelvin never made, so you may safely trust the future to be kind to it.
“May the Algorithm's Force be with you.” | ||||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 3 | 41 | https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/ICM2006/offline/icm2006.mathunion.org/press/bulletins/bulletin13/index.html | en | International Congress of Mathematicians MADRID 2006 | [
"https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/ICM2006/offline/icm2006.mathunion.org/imgs/logo_sup_icm.gif",
"https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/ICM2006/offline/icm2006.mathunion.org/imgs/logo_inf_icm.gif",
"https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/ICM2006/offline/icm2006.mathunion.org/archivos/Image/ICM/boletin_... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | Bulletin number -13
29 May 2006
INDEX:
Painting with Numbers
The ICM2006 Fractal Art Competition Hill be decided in June
Interview with Marta Sanz-Solé, President of the ICM2006 Local Programme Committee
“This ICM places the accent on the fruitful interaction among the different areas of mathematics”
Plenary Session: Iain Johnstone
How to Convert Data into Information
El ICM sección a sección
Fundamentos matemáticos de las ciencias de la computación
Satellite Conferences: Gran Canaria
Intelligent Computation Imitates the “Practical Wisdom” of Living Beings
Applications
Encrypted Messages
Painting with Numbers
The ICM2006 Fractal Art Competition Hill be decided in June
Equations are a way of describing reality, but some equations can be used the other way round; that is, to generate artificial worlds. Equations describing fractal sets, for example, can give rise to landscapes as fascinating as those depicted in famous canvases. Does this sound impossible? Before jumping to conclusions, it would be better to take a look at the works on display at the Exhibition of Fractal Art, which forms part of the ICM2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, to be held from August 22nd to 30th at the ICM2006 venue and at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid. Many of the works exhibited will come from the Benoit Mandelbrot ICM2006 International Competition of Fractal Art, the prizes for which will be announced in June.
The ICM2006 Exhibition of Fractal Art will be held thanks to support from the Fundación Española de Ciencia y Tecnología (Fecyt – Spanish Foundation and Science and Technology). More than three hundred entries have been received from all over the world for the Fractal Art Competition. The jury will be chaired by Benoit Mandelbrot himself, widely recognized as the “father” of fractal geometry.
What are fractals? It is not necessary to enter into a complicated mathematical description to get an intuitive grasp of what they are: structures which, “when a small portion is observed, preserve a similar, although not necessarily identical appearance to what they look like when observed in their entirety”, explains Javier Barrallo, one of the organizers of the fractal art competition, and a fractal artist himself. Some examples of fractals are: a tree and its branches; a cauliflower, apparently made up of endless cauliflowers joined together; the coastline of a country…
The example of a coastline serves to explain another property of fractals; the fact that no matter how small the scale at which they are observed – however close you “zoom in” – they always keep the same appearance, and so on to infinity. Obviously, a coastline is not infinite – “authentic” fractals are a mathematical idealization – but the effect of the fractal phenomenon can be seen to be real in the “coastline paradox”. When a coastline, or for that matter any rough surface, is measured, the result will vary according to the accuracy desired: if one takes into account the shape of bays, of rocks, of grains of sand, etc., the coastline will get theoretically longer and longer, and in an ideal fractal it would be infinite.
Is it really art?
Beyond the strictly aesthetic qualities, in the opinion of some people these properties give added value to works of “fractal art”. However, these works have not always been considered art. Are they not merely a computer-generated graphic representation of a formula? Yes and no, reply the authors of fractal art. What follows is a brief explanation of how a fractal is painted.
The point of departure is indeed a mathematical formula. The first fractal formulae were described more than a century ago. Today there are hundreds. And yes, as Barrallo explains, the computer is vital: “A small image, one of 640 x 480 pixels, for example, contains 307,200 dots that must be calculated. It may be necessary to calculate each one of these dots about 1,000 times by the formula determining the fractal. This means that the formula must be calculated more than 300 million times. And this is just for a small-size image!”.
So, armed with both formula and computer, we must now proceed to iteration. This involves “calculating a formula over and over again, starting from its initial value”, says Barrallo. “After calculating the formula for the first time, we take the resulting value and introduce it into the formula. The new result is calculated again, and so on successively”. In the case of fractals, the initial value has to do with the position of the dot in the frame (the pixel on the screen).
Then colours are assigned according to the value of each dot. The fact that the behaviour of two dots situated very close together can be radically different – one diverging toward the infinite and the other converging toward a given value - is “what makes fractal exploration so fascinating”, says Barrallo. And what leads to the explosion of shapes and colours in the image.
But this is not in the least due exclusively to the computer. “An image of 800 x 600 dots contains 480,000 pixels, or dots on the screen, which can be combined in an image in 103467865 different ways; that is, 10 followed by more than three million zeros. A computer does not possess the capacity to select images from among such an immense collection and determine which are beautiful and which are not”. It is the hand, or in this case, the brain, of the artist that are the vital factors. Furthermore, as in all art, and in mathematics themselves, fractal art is in a constant state of evolution. The algorithms currently employed have little to do with those employed twenty years ago.
For further information:
Interview with Benoit Mandelbrot in InfoICM2006-05-24
/prensa/boletines/boletin19/#mandelbrot
Fractal Art Competition web site:
http://www.fractalartcontests.com/2006/
Information about fractals:
http://www.divulgamat.net (in “Virtual Exhibitions” and “Art and Mathematics”)
www.fractalus.com
Interview with Marta Sanz-Solé, President of the ICM2006 Local Programme Committee
“This ICM places the accent on the fruitful interaction among the different areas of mathematics”
Marta Sanz-Solé teaches at the University of Barcelona, the same university from which she graduated (1974) and gained her doctorate (1978), and where she has been Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and vice-president of the Division of Sciences. She has spent time doing research in the USA, Italy, France and Switzerland, and her research work has been centered on Malliavin’s calculus and stochastic analysis. She is the author of some 80 publications, serves as a member on various committees and has participated in the organization of numerous congresses and events. In recent months she has devoted much time and effort as a member of the Organizing Committee to the ICM2006 World Congress of Mathematicians, in particular as the president of the Local Programme Committee in charge of organizing the scientific content of the event.
How has the scientific programme for the ICM2006 been drawn up?
There is a committee responsible for deciding on the number of scientific sections in the congress and their content. On this occasion, the ICM2006 has been divided into 20 different sections. This Programme Committee is named by the International Mathematical Union executive committee, and it also responsible for putting forward the names of invited speakers, both for the plenary lectures and the talks given in each section.
¿What is the task of the committee you are chairing?
The members of the LPC (Local Programme Committee) work in co-ordination with the Programme Committee, and our main job is the organization of the congress programme. It’s a question of arranging the agenda in a coherent manner. You have to take into account the fact that invited talks in each section must necessarily overlap, so they have to be scheduled in such a way that related fields do not coincide with each other, as far as this is possible, because all the talks are of interest to the majority of the audience. We are also responsible for the schedule of the plenary programme, since this will highlight trends and set the pace of the congress.
Don’t you find it frustrating that others decide on the content?
Those are the rules of the game. However, we have a certain scope for movement. The Organizing Committee of the congress has the prerogative of proposing one plenary lecturer and three section speakers, and it has delegated this choice to the LPC. Furthermore, we are responsible for many other activities in the programme, such as Special Activities and Other Activities. Personally, I’ve been deeply involved in some of these scientific activities. For example, I’m the organizer of the Closing Round Table, an activity which has been included in the ICM for the very first time. All the panellists are prestigious mathematicians, one of whom is Lennart Carleson, the winner of this year’s Abel Prize. The title of the round table - Are Pure and Applied Mathematics Drifting Apart? – is a reflection of the interest in the debate about this delicate dovetailing between two aspects of the profession, as well as the need to work closely together to make important advances in an eminently technological society. In fact, the programme for this ICM places the accent on the fruitful interaction among the different fields of mathematics, which until a short time ago were following divergent paths.
One of these ‘special activities’ is devoted to promulgation: Are you worried about the public image of mathematics?
Of course; most people don’t even realize that mathematics are useful, or even that they are present in our daily activity. Their intellectual value and appeal remain largely unknown. The image people have of them is of something boring; it’s a subject surrounded by a lack of understanding and a lack of communication. However, we intend to deal with this question at a round table proposed by the European Mathematical Society, in which I am also involved as joint organizer, and which has even broader objectives. The debate will revolve around how to make mathematics more accessible to scientists working in other disciplines; how to communicate the values of our research to politicians, who are the ones who decide on funding for research, and how to convey the real values of mathematics to young people who are on the point of choosing their future university education and PhD courses.
In addition to the invited speakers, there are also other contributions: Are you and your colleagues involved in the process of selection for these?
Certainly; I was about to explain this before. This is a very important part of the congress, and we on the committee have been responsible for organizing all of it. We were responsible for the “call for abstracts” in three different categories: oral communications, posters, and contributions on mathematical software. Then we evaluated the abstracts submitted for these contributions and programmed their presentation in the appropriate sessions.
How many were submitted and how many have been selected?
Well, the question is how many will be presented during the congress, because the figures may vary. Approximately 1,600 were submitted. After the evaluation process, and taking into account the withdrawals, we have at the moment about 1,400. However, we know from past experience that some of those who have submitted contributions will not actually attend the congress. I would hazard a guess that the final count will be about 800 oral communications, 300 posters, and 25 mathematical software presentations, which will be a great success in terms of participation.
¿Does this represent any change in comparison with previous congresses?
I think the final figures will be similar to those of the ICM 98 in Berlin. However, we’ve introduced some changes, such as increasing the time for oral communications from 15 to 20 minutes. We’ve also made a special effort to promote the presentation of posters. There’s not much tradition of posters among mathematicians, even though they are more informal, can be much richer, and facilitate greater interaction with people interested in the subject. One of our initiatives has been to organize a competition with prizes for the best posters in terms of presentation, visual quality and content. There are two prizes in each section, although they can also be declared void.
How many people are on the LPC?
There are nine members in all, covering a broad range of mathematical fields, although each one is working in collaboration with between ten and fifteen other people on the evaluation process and other tasks, because there’s a great deal of work to do.
Marta Sanz personal web page
http://www.mat.ub.es/~sanz
President of the IMU Programme Committee
Noga Alon, Universidad de Tel-Aviv
nogaa@tau.ac.il
http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~nogaa
Local Programme Committee (LPC):
/organization/localprogramcommittee/
Plenary Session: Iain Johnstone
How to Convert Data into Information
For some time now the following wording can be found in many job advertisements: “Minimum requirements: Experience in the implantation of Information Management Systems (Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Mining)". Given the growing amount of data handled in many sectors, experience in information management is becoming increasingly necessary. The mathematician Iain Johnstone will give a plenary lecture at the ICM2006 on “High Dimensional Statistical Inference and Random Matrices”, which will deal with the management of massive amounts of data.
Until recently, statistics was centered on the study of one- and multi-dimensional random variables. However, the development of computation has led to the era of “data mining", and all organizations – banks, hospitals, research centres – handle enormous quantities of data which must often be constantly available, such as financial assets. Statistics in high dimensions are essential for analysing this data, and this will be the central theme of Johnstone’s lecture. This branch of mathematics shows how to organize and summarize data, whether it involves an electrocardiogram, Internet traffic or a stocks and shares, in such a way that they provide useful information.
Iain Johnstone was born in Melbourne in 1956. In 1977 he graduated in mathematics at the Australian National University, specializing in pure mathematics and statistics. He obtained his doctorate in statistics from Cornell University in 1981. Since then he has been associated with Stanford University in California, where in 1992 he became professor of statistics and biostatistics. In addition to his work on biostatistics, in the field of statistics he has received much recognition.
Lecturer: Iain Johnstone
“High Dimensional Statistical Inference and Random Matrices”
Date: Friday, August 25th: 10:15-11:15
ICM2006 Scientific Programme
/scientificprogram/plenarylectures/
More about Iain Johnstone:
http://www-stat.stanford.edu/people/faculty/johnstone/
http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Browse&link2=Results&id=1345
Plenary Session:
Mathematical Foundations of the Computational Sciences
One of the main mathematical problems in theoretical computer science is that known as P vs NP. A simple example suffices to understand the nature of this problem:
Suppose that we wish to select a group of one hundred people from a total of four hundred candidates. Selection must be carried out according to certain determining criteria (for example, in accordance with a list of incompatible pairs; Tom and Dick cannot be together, neither can Harry or So-and-So, nor Tom with Harry etc.).
Bear in mind that the total number of ways of selecting one hundred elements out of four hundred easily exceeds the number of atoms making up the known universe. Not even an exhaustive search by means of a super-computer would be capable of covering every possible combination.
This is an example of what is known as an NP problem, whose main characteristic is that it is (relatively) easy to check whether a particular selection satisfies the given criteria. However, the task of generating a solution directly is in general quite difficult. P problems, on the other hand, are those for which direct methods exist for providing solutions (relatively easy).
The P vs NP problem consists in providing a problem for which a possible solution can be easily checked, but which requires an excessively long time for solutions to be found by direct methods, or for demonstrating that such problems do not exist. At present, the majority feeling in the scientific community is that such problems do indeed exist. Paradoxically, increasingly efficient algorithms are being found for problems traditionally considered difficult to solve. Manindra Agrawal has this year been awarded the Gödel Prize from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science for demonstrating that the problem for determining whether a number is prime belongs to class P.
In fact, for many problems of practical importance, methods based on carrying out a random selection and checking that it satisfies the appropriate restrictions have proved to be simpler and faster than the best direct algorithms known to date. Similarly in combinatorics, objects exist (such as self-correcting codes) whose existence is easy to check by means of probabilistic methods, but for which only explicit constructions are available that are very complex for approximating optimal solutions.
It is perhaps surprising to learn that in recent years results have been obtained which suggest that every random algorithm can be simulated by a deterministic algorithm of comparable efficiency. As an example we have Agrawal’s deterministic algorithm for checking if a number is prime in polynomial-time, and Omer Reingold’s deterministic algorithm for solving problems of connectivity in undirected graphs having less than linear logarithmic complexity with regard to the memory required.
Worthy of mention in relation to this are Ronnit Rubinfeld researches, which are centered on the study of algorithms of complexity less than linear, that is to say, sublinear. At a time when enormous amounts of data must be handled, algorithms of linear complexity can prove to be impracticable. Many interesting problems exist for which algorithms of sublinear complexity are known, although they are often random and provide approximate solutions. With regard to this point, Luca Trevisan will speak on the elimination of randomness, quasi-randomness and the direct constructions of combinatorial objects such as error-correcting codes.
Jon Kleinberg’s talk will deal with graphs in which any pair of nodes are linked by a short length path (small world graphs) and with random methods of finding such paths. This avenue of research has applications to the theory of algorithms and to discrete probability.
Tim Roughgarden will address the connections between theoretical computer science and game theory, known as algorithmic game theory, with particular attention to the use of potential functions for delimiting the equilibria inefficiency of different models of selfish behaviour in networks. An example of this behaviour can be found in the well-known dilemma posed by two prisoners in solitary confinement who are given the choice between two options; if, because of their isolation from each other, the behaviour of each one is governed by self-interest, then the final result will be negative for both.
For his part, Alexander Holevo will present results related to quantum computation, which is a paradigm of computation based on quantum mechanics alternative to the classical paradigm, in which quantum bits are used instead of customary bits. The quantum paradigm makes new algorithms possible, and the same task may involve different complexity in classical computation and in quantum computation, all of which has aroused great expectation, since it renders some formerly intractable problems tractable. It is worth pointing out, for example, that Peter Shor was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize in 1998 for his polynomial complexity factoring algorithm based on quantum computation.
Manuel Ojeda Aciego
Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Málaga.
Satellite Conferences: Gran Canaria
Intelligent Computation Imitates the “Practical Wisdom” of Living Beings
The possibility of designing systems that imitate how human beings, animals and other living beings process information and solve problems has long been a dream of Computational Science. Today, after half a century of research work, techniques have been developed which provide benefits for a broad spectrum of sectors. Neuronal networks, expert systems, diffuse logic and evolutionary computation are just some of the techniques that have proved capable of identifying complex patterns in vast sets of data, providing support for decision-making based on qualitative and quantitative factors, and for giving solutions to problems involving high-complexity variables. Armed with these resources, computer science is now able to tackle designs for increasingly complex applications, manage greater volumes of information, seek “intelligent” solutions and discover unsuspected correlations in data bases.
The Fifth International Conference on Engineering Computational Technology and the Eighth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology, the two symposia to be held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria this September, will cover all these topics, as well as debating the latest computational technology applications to all aspects of engineering, structural mechanics and other fields. Furthermore, the latest advances in hardware and software, algorithms and theoretical development will also be discussed.
The two conferences will be held concurrently, and participants will be able to attend the talks given at both. In addition to mathemat-icians and engineers, scientists from other specialized fields are expected to attend.
“The Fifth International Conference
on Engineering Computational Technology”
Person to contact: Gustavo Montero
e-mail: gustavo@dma.ulpgc.es
web: http://www.civil-comp.com/conf/ect2006.htm
“The Eighth International Conference
on Computational Structures Technology”
Person to contact: Rafael Montenegro
e-mail: rafa@dma.ulpgc.es
web: http://www.civil-comp.com/conf/cst2006.htm
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
12-15 September 2006
Applications
Encrypted Messages
Exchange of information is an on-going process in 21st century society, where data must travel rapidly and constantly, whether it be in the form of bank transfers, telephone conversations or official documents. The robustness of the entire system rests on the possibility of encrypting information to enable it to be transmitted quickly and safely without being used or intercepted by prying eyes. Once again, mathematics has a key role to play in this process. According to Alejandro Melle, professor of algebra at the Complutense University of Madrid, there are many theoretical systems envolved in the field of encryption. However, most of them cannot be used in applications because they are insufficient for ensuring a secure and fluid exchange of information.
The mathematical community is hard at work in both the generation of encryption algorithms and in cryptoanalysis; that is, the breaking of encryption algorithms. This is the combination that makes security really effective, since cryptographic algorithms must necessarily belong to the public sphere, so that the security of the cryptosystem is based on mathematics and not on secrecy. Trends in security processes and protocols currently used in the world are largely set by the NSA (National Security Agency) and by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), both North American organizations. Furthermore, the most frequently employed encryption protocols are based on two fundamental problems of mathematics: “the big number factorization problem” and “the discrete logarithm problem”.
In particular, the RSA protocol, which is the most commonly used, revolves around the idea of the big number factorization problem: given a very large number N, it is very difficult to find its prime factors (p, q), such that N = p x q. Nevertheless, even though it is difficult to find these factors, the increased availability of more powerful computers requires the use of ever larger numbers in order to prevent problems from occurring. As Melle explains, it is customary now to work with key sizes of 1024 bits or even 2048 bits, and the greater the key size, the slower the speed of operation. It is for that reason that the Fábrica Nacional de la Moneda y Timbre (National Mint), which acts as the State Certifying Authority (responsible for issuing digital certificates for official transactions with the Government), officially advises against the use of key sizes of 2048 bits.
Moreover, protocols based on the discrete logarithm problem either work on finite bodies or on elliptical curves on finite bodies. Cryptography based on elliptical curves ensures security for systems with much smaller key sizes, and is therefore used in supports where storage space is a determining factor, such as in credit cards.
For further information:
Alejadro Melle: amelle@mat.ucm.es
Cryptomathic company
http://www.cryptomathic.com/labs/ellipticcurves.html
Second Cryptography Hash Workshop
ttp://www.csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/index.html | ||||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 14 | https://rjlipton.com/2015/01/04/mathematics-its-about-the-future/ | en | Mathematics: It’s About the Future | [
"https://i0.wp.com/rjlipton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/terencetaobreakthroughprizeawardsceremonyjt_frjy0yxil.jpg?resize=300%2C203&ssl=1",
"https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%7B%5Cbullet+%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0&c=20201002",
"https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%7Bp%2Fq%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0&c=20201002... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2015-01-04T00:00:00 | How some predictions fared in 2020 and other years Zimbio source Simon Donaldson, Maxim Kontsevich, Terence Tao, Richard Taylor, and Jacob Lurie (photo order) won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. This did not happen since last Thursday Jan. 1; it happened last June. When Tao was asked at the start of his Nov. 2014… | en | Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP | https://rjlipton.com/2015/01/04/mathematics-its-about-the-future/ | How some predictions fared in 2020 and other years
Zimbio source
Simon Donaldson, Maxim Kontsevich, Terence Tao, Richard Taylor, and Jacob Lurie (photo order) won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. This did not happen since last Thursday Jan. 1; it happened last June. When Tao was asked at the start of his Nov. 2014 appearance on The Colbert Report to explain the 2015 prize date, he said:
“It’s about the future.”
Today Dick and I salute the prize-winners, and preview a new book about advances that were made in the years 2015–2019.
The prizes are awarded also in Fundamental Physics and Life Sciences. The physics prize was founded by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, who were joined by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Jack Ma and Catherine Zhang for the whole foundation. Each award is $3 million, over twice the emolument of a Nobel prize.
Prizes, in general, have been criticized as an inefficient way to reward past achievements. However, Tao’s impression was confirmed to us by a possibly misdirected e-mail: the prize is awarded for breakthroughs in the future. This includes Tao’s project mentioned at the end of his Colbert appearance about “whether water can spontaneously blow up.”
The E-Mail
One consequence of publishing books is getting more e-mails. Some come from Amazon and other retailers putting the books you’ve written high on lists of titles recommended for you. Others are requests from your publishers to review other books and proposals, which is only fair since we are grateful for several in-depth reviews of our early sketch of our quantum algorithms textbook as well as the short reviews on the jacket. Most interesting, however, is that sometimes you get copied on internal business where a general suggestion might be run by you.
I had just gotten off the phone with Dick one Friday afternoon last month as he was sending me a post draft when the expected ‘beep’ on my machine turned out to be from one of our publishers, with PDF not LaTeX attached. The subject line said,
Breakthrough 2020 frontmatter
I froze for a minute wondering if this meant something was wrong with our book. Then came the ‘beep’ from Dick’s e-mail. The other e-mail stayed at the bottom, which meant it had been post-dated in the manner of various spams that evade my filter. More puzzling, the time shown in my Thunderbird window was 2 minutes before Dick’s mail. It showed 15:16 but Dick’s mail showed 15:18 so it should have been sorted later. I had to do several clicks to get the full datestamp:
12/13/19 15:16
Really ’19’ not ’14’ as expected. I saw Dick was cc-ed like me, but before calling him back I read the short message body:
Greenlight GLL on attached proposal for their reactions and getting those of readers.
Perhaps we were not supposed to be copied yet, but Dick agreed the intent was clear, so we both clicked open the PDF. We are happy to bring its contents to you now.
The Book
The title page read, Breakthrough 2020: Visions of the Future. The next page included John Rainwater and Sam Parc as editors. We had to hunt to find Rainwater’s track record in functional analysis, but Parc was easy: she had numerous books including the beautiful 50 Visions of Mathematics, which had maybe influenced this title. The dedication page leapt out:
To all the co-workers whose efforts made the past five years a new Golden Age of mathematics.
Still thinking 2015, I—and Dick too—wondered how closely their selection would match the recent results we’d highlighted in 5+ years on this blog. But the Table of Contents brought nothing we’d seen before:
Preface ………………………………………….. by Sergey Brin xi
Acknowledgments …………………………. xv
(No) More Secrets ………………………. by Maxim Kontsevich 1
Exploding Universes ………………….. by Terence Tao 37
Interfaces ……………………………………. by Simon Donaldson and Edward Witten 63
ABC and the D Theorem …………….. by Richard Taylor and Shinichi Mochizuki 105
Analyzing Stacks With Stacks ……. by Jacob Lurie 139
The Supersymmetry Wall ………….. by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Leonard Susskind 187
Shaking Off the Dust ………………….. by Alan Guth and Andrei Linde 205
The preface explained much but left other things hanging:
When we established the Breakthrough Prizes we did not intend to destroy the world economy, much less destroy the universe. We almost destroyed our companies, which were already affected by the 2015 Hacker War, but government bailouts from Amazon to us to Zynga helped erect the Quinternet to restore secure e-commerce. Although quantum networking and Qubitcoin-2 took millions of people working together on the outside, Maxim Kontsevich describes the inside in thirty-six pages. The theme of destruction and creation continues with Terry Tao. He began with a childlike question: “can water explode?” Of course it doesn’t, we think. But the entire universe is immersed in “water” called the Higgs Field, and from 2012 we know it is only semi-stable. This seemed horrible news, but Terry’s work hints it may be necessary to support informational processes that can generate life.
Simon Donaldson’s doctoral work showed the existence of 4-manifolds having topological but not differentiable correspondences to the standard one, but does Nature avail herself of them? His work with Ed Witten at the Stony Brook Simons Center during the Long Island Quarantine expands the possibility of yes. Geometry and numbers were joined in amazing claims by Shinichi Mochizuki in 2012, but it took Richard Taylor to close a hole in the proof of the “ABC Conjecture.” What they call “D-theory” for Dirichlet goes even further toward proving conjectures by Robert Langlands that once seemed a pipe dream. Jacob Lurie sprang open some questions in computational complexity by applying his higher algebra to analyze two-way pushdown automata. This does not yet solve P versus NP, but he shows how it stratifies the possible relationships between computational time and computational space.
The excerpt ended there. Nothing about the last two physics chapters. Clearly the contents too were incomplete. Perhaps they were considering life-science chapters or more physics but needed more editors? The first seven chapters seemed to be finished, given the page numbers, but were not attached. What could they contain?
Our Guesses on the Book
The physics chapters left out of the preface were the easiest for me and Dick to guess. Arkani-Hamed and Susskind must have done something—or would do something—to explain why supersymmetry could not be observed by the Large Hadron Collider. Perhaps the pervasive spatial tension accompanying a positive cosmological constant simply walls off creating even an echo of conditions under supersymmetry. From Guth’s and Linde’s title, evidently the flaws in last year’s analysis of B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background had been fixed with higher confidence than now, confirming gravitational waves and inflation.
Kontsevich’s title obviously referred to the 1992 Robert Redford movie “Sneakers,” whose premise is that factoring has been efficiently solved—classically. Perhaps Kontsevich’s approximations to Richard Feynman’s path integrals broke the parts of Peter Shor’s quantum factoring algorithm that had not already been shown classically approximable. Dick and I could not tell what “D-theory” is supposed to be; we thought of “D-maps” for the Jacobian conjecture but those are named for someone else. We already riffed on Tao’s computational Navier-Stokes theory in our 2014 April Fool’s post, but apparently it was no joke.
I recognized the pun in Lurie’s title, since while writing our memorial post on Alexander Grothendieck I had perused his 600+ page manuscript “Pursuing Stacks.” A paper by Lurie and Dennis Gaitsgory which Bill Gasarch cited as “solving a real problem” runs to 394 single-spaced wide journal pages, so I marveled at the chapter staying under 50 pages. Howard Straubing’s book Finite Automata, Formal Logic, and Circuit Complexity laid out connections from finite automata to category theory and algebra, while connections between pushdowns and complexity were shown 40 years ago by Zvi Galil, so I guess connecting pushdown automata to category theory and algebra was a difficult but possible next step.
The Donaldson-Witten title harked me back to a dinner thirty years ago at Merton College, Oxford, in honor of Donaldson. I was then a Junior Fellow of the college, and was seated across from Witten at the High Table. Just as the main course was served, I asked Witten whether it was possible for two of Donaldson’s manifolds to be joined so that an arbitrarily large distance in one could be traveled by crossing, going a short distance in the other, and crossing back. To my surprise this was not a silly question; here is the same idea for a simple wormhole, but I had higher-dimensional gluing in mind. Witten rhapsodized in reply for over 30 minutes without once touching his food. I ate gingerly trying not to interrupt but eventually cleared my plate, as did everyone else, while the hubbub of the lower student tables subsided to silence as the great hall emptied. I recall the serving staff standing helplessly by, since protocol prevented the next course from starting until everyone had finished, with their gazes fixed on the unbroken Cornish hen or similar bird. Possibly after an offer to substitute a warm one, Witten finally ate with due dignity while the rest of us discussed various subjects, before all progressed equally to the next courses.
2014 Predictions Scorecard
Although our last year’s predictions were jocular, we will still score them. Perhaps all “predictions” should be taken no more seriously than those on last Thursday’s Rose Bowl outcome.
Two integers of over one million digits each, in decimal, will be discovered so that
Wrong: Okay we were kidding, but it would have been fun—no?
Trading in Bitcoins will be stopped when an anonymous team posts an algorithm that breaks the scheme. Social media will be abuzz with the question: why did they post it? They could have made billions in real dollars.
Wrong: Okay but we still bet they would have gone for the fame. We should have predicted instead that a Bitcoin company would sponsor a college bowl game.
A new field of computer science called computational football will be one of the hottest areas of research.
Half-Wrong: Since ESPN pays almost a billion US dollars per year for rights to college football, something computational must be going on.
A proof that there is a proof that there is a proof that there is no proof that there is a proof that there is a proof in Peano Arithmetic of will be found.
Wrong, or don’t we know?
Computer scientists will sweep the all the Nobel Prizes except Peace and Literature.
Wrong. We might have been right about the Literature prize though, since its unexpected winner was once tutored in geometry by the computational novelist Raymond Queneau.
A company called Braincloud LLC will announce a competitor for Google Glass that is controlled directly by brain pulses.
Wrong. Though possibly things like it are being surreptitiously tested at chess.
A new massively-multiplayer online role-playing computer game called “DoS Survivor” will take the world by storm.
Pretty close: the massive Xbox and PlayStation denial-of-service hack on Christmas Day made players of many.
MOOCs will adopt a “human-centered support structure.” This will involve geographically localized cells of up-close instruction at regularly spaced time intervals, with generous time in-between for absorbing material and practicing non-bubble exercises.
Right: They are called classrooms. Yes.
Three reader predictions in comments to last year’s post were:
“A computer will make an amazing conjecture that looks true but nobody can prove—not even a computer.”
“Schemes for quantum correction algorithms will begin being viewed as how to restrict the free-will of systems.”
“Someone from very rich people (Bill Gates or Sergey Brin, for example) [will] make Nobel-2 Prize (like Nobel Prize) for CS.”
These seem to have come closer than most of ours. The CIA and the movie “Back to the Future II” also came closer. For best result of 2014 we nominate discoveries by Tao and others about gaps between primes.
Open Problems
Our book chapters amount to predictions. How will they fare by 2020? You are welcome to put your own predictions in the comments.
Happy New Year from GLL.
[word changes—see first KWR comment] | |||||
2453 | dbpedia | 3 | 16 | https://scottaaronson.blog/%3Fp%3D7916 | en | Optimized | [
"https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png",
"https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-facebook-twitter-share-buttons/images/specificfeeds_follow.png",
"https://149663533.v2.pressablecdn.com... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | The Blog of Scott Aaronson | en | Shtetl-Optimized | https://scottaaronson.blog/ | Q1: Who will you be voting for in November?
A: Kamala Harris (and mainstream Democrats all down the ballot), of course.
Q2: Of course?
A: If the alternative is Trump, I would’ve voted for Biden’s rotting corpse. Or for Hunter Biden. Or for…
Q3: Why can’t you see this is just your Trump Derangement Syndrome talking?
A: Look, my basic moral commitments remain pretty much as they’ve been since childhood. Namely, that I’m on the side of reason, Enlightenment, scientific and technological progress, secular government, pragmatism, democracy, individual liberty, justice, intellectual honesty, an American-led peaceful world order, preservation of the natural world, mitigation of existential risks, and human flourishing. (Crazy and radical, I know.)
Only when choosing between candidates who all espouse such values, do I even get the luxury of judging them on any lower-order bits. Sadly, I don’t have that luxury today. Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself. No amount of squinting can ever reconcile those with the values I listed before.
Q4: Is that all that’s wrong with him?
A: No, there are also the lies, and worst of all the “Big Lie.” Trump is the first president in US history to incite a mob to try to overturn the results of an election. He was serious! He very nearly succeeded, and probably would have, had Mike Pence been someone else. It’s now inarguable that Trump rejects the basic rules of our system, or “accepts” them only when he wins. We’re numb from having heard it so many times, but it’s a big deal, as big a deal as the Civil War was.
Q5: Oh, so this is about your precious “democracy.” Why do you care? Haven’t you of all people learned that the masses are mostly idiots and bullies, who don’t deserve power? As Curtis Yarvin keeps trying to explain to you, instead of “democracy,” you should want a benevolent king or dictator-CEO, who could offer a privileged position to the competent scientists like yourself.
A: Yeah, so how many examples does history furnish where that worked out well? I suppose you might make a partial case for Napoleon, or Ataturk? More to the point: even if benevolent, science-and-reason-loving authoritarian strongmen are possible in theory, do you really expect me to believe that Trump could be one of them? I still love how Scott Alexander put it in 2016:
Can anyone honestly say that Trump or his movement promote epistemic virtue? That in the long-term, we’ll be glad that we encouraged this sort of thing, that we gave it power and attention and all the nutrients it needed to grow? That the road to whatever vision of a just and rational society we imagine, something quiet and austere with a lot of old-growth trees and Greek-looking columns, runs through LOCK HER UP?
I don’t like having to vote for the lesser of two evils. But at least I feel like I know who it is.
Q6: But what about J. D. Vance? He got his start in Silicon Valley, was championed by Peter Thiel, and is obviously highly intelligent. Doesn’t he seem like someone who might listen to and empower tech nerds like yourself?
A: Who can say what J. D. Vance believes? Here are a few choice quotes of his from eight years ago:
I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country. But I also think that people have always believed crazy shit (I remember a poll from a few years back suggesting that a near majority of democratic voters blame ‘the Jews’ for the financial crisis). And there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.
The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.
[Trump is] just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.
To get from that to being Trump’s running mate is a Simone-Biles-like feat of moral acrobatics. Vance reminds me of the famous saying by L. Ron Hubbard from his pre-Dianetics days: “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” (And I feel like Harris’s whole campaign strategy should just be to replay Vance’s earlier musings in wall-to-wall ads while emphasizing her agreement with them.) No, Vance is not someone I trust to share my values, if he has values at all.
Q7: What about the other side’s values, or lack thereof? I mean, don’t you care that the whole Democratic establishment—including Harris—colluded to cover up that Biden was senile and cognitively unfit to be president now, let alone for another term?
A: Look, we’ve all seen what happens as a relative gets old. It’s gradual. It’s hard for anyone to say at which specific moment they can no longer drive a car, or be President of the United States, or whatever. This means that I don’t necessarily read evil intent into the attempts to cover up Biden’s decline—merely an epic, catastrophic failure of foresight. That failure of foresight itself would’ve been a huge deal in normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances—not if you believe, as I do, that the alternative is the beginning of the end of a 250-year-old democratic experiment.
Q8: Oh stop being so melodramatic. What terrible thing happened to you because of Trump’s first term? Did you lose your job? Did fascist goons rough you up in the street?
A: Well, my Iranian PhD student came close to having his visa revoked, and it became all but impossible to recruit PhD students from China. That sucked, since I care about my students’ welfare like I care about my own. Also, the downfall of Roe v. Wade, which enabled Texas’ draconian new abortion laws, made it much harder for us to recruit faculty at UT Austin. But I doubt any of that will impress you. “Go recruit American students,” you’ll say. “Go recruit conservative faculty who are fine with abortion being banned.”
The real issue is that Trump was severely restrained in his first term, by being surrounded by people who (even if, in many cases, they started out loyal to him) were also somewhat sane and valued the survival of the Republic. Alas, he learned from that, and he won’t repeat that mistake the next time.
Q9: Why do you care so much about Trump’s lies? Don’t you realize that all politicians lie?
A: Yes, but there are importantly different kinds of lies. There are white lies. There are scheming, 20-dimensional Machiavellian lies, like a secret agent’s cover story (or is that only in fiction?). There are the farcical, desperate, ever-shifting lies of the murderer to the police detective or the cheating undergrad to the professor. And then there are the lies of bullies and mob bosses and populist autocrats, which are special and worse.
These last, call them power-lies, are distinguished by the fact that they aren’t even helped by plausibility. Often, as with conspiracy theories (which strongly overlap with power-lies), the more absurd the better. Obama was born in Kenya. Trump’s crowd was the biggest in history. The 2020 election was stolen by a shadowy conspiracy involving George Soros and Dominion and Venezuela.
The central goal of a power-lie is just to demonstrate your power to coerce others into repeating it, much like with the Party making Winston Smith affirm 2+2=5, or Petruchio making Katharina call the sun the moon in The Taming of the Shrew. A closely-related goal is as a loyalty test for your own retinue.
It’s Trump’s embrace of the power-lie that puts him beyond the pale for me.
Q10: But Scott, we haven’t even played our “Trump” card yet. Starting on October 7, 2023, did you not witness thousands of your supposed allies, the educated secular progressives on “the right side of history,” cheer the sadistic mass-murder of Jews—or at least, make endless excuses for those who did? Did this not destabilize your entire worldview? Will you actually vote for a party half of which seems at peace with the prospect of your family members’ physical annihilation? Or will you finally see who your real friends now are: Arkansas MAGA hillbillies who pray for your people’s survival?
A: Ah, this is your first slash that’s actually drawn blood. I won’t pretend that the takeover of part of the US progressive coalition by literal Hamasniks hasn’t been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Yes, if I had to be ruled by either (a) a corrupt authoritarian demagogue or (b) an idiot college student chanting for “Intifada Revolution,” I’d be paralyzed. So it’s lucky that I don’t face that choice! I get to vote, once more, for a rather boring mainstream Democrat—alongside at least 70% of American Jews. The idea of Harris as an antisemite would be ludicrous even if she didn’t have a Jewish husband or wasn’t strongly considering a pro-Israel Jew as her running mate.
Q11: Sure, Kamala Harris might mouth all the right platitudes about Israel having a right to defend itself, but she’ll constantly pressure Israel to make concessions to Hamas and Hezbollah. She’ll turn a blind eye to Iran’s imminent nuclearization. Why don’t you stay up at night worrying that, if you vote for a useful idiot like her, you’ll have Israel’s annihilation and a second Holocaust on your conscience forever?
A: Look, oftentimes—whenever, for example, I’m spending hours reading anti-Zionists on Twitter—I feel like there’s no limit to how intensely Zionist I am. On reflection, though, there is a limit. Namely, I’m not going to be more Zionist than the vast majority of my Israeli friends and colleagues—the ones who served in the IDF, who in some cases did reserve duty in Gaza, who prop up the Israeli economy with their taxes, and who will face the consequences of whatever happens more directly than I will. With few exceptions, these friends despise the Trump/Bibi alliance with white-hot rage, and they desperately want more moderate leadership in both countries.
Q12: Suppose I concede that Kamala is OK on Israel. We both know that she’s not the future of the Democratic Party, any more than Biden is. The future is what we all saw on campuses this spring. “Houthis Houthis make us proud, turn another ship around.” How can you vote for a party whose rising generation seems to want you and your family dead?
A: Let me ask you something. When Trump won in 2016, did that check the power of the campus radicals? Or as Scott Alexander prophesied at the time, did it energize and embolden them like nothing else, by dramatically confirming their theology of a planet held hostage by the bullying, misogynistic rich white males? I fundamentally reject your premise that, if I’m terrified of crazy left-wing extremists, then a good response is to vote for the craziest right-wing extremists I can find, in hopes that the two will somehow cancel each other out. Instead I should support a coherent Enlightenment alternative to radicalism, or the closest thing to that available.
Q13: Even leaving aside Israel, how can you not be terrified by what the Left has become? Which side denounced you on social media a decade ago, as a misogynist monster who wanted all women to be his sex slaves? Which side tried to ruin your life and career? Did we, the online rightists, do that? No. We did not. We did nothing worse to you than bemusedly tell you to man up, grow a pair, and stop pleading for sympathy from feminists who will hate you no matter what.
A: I’ll answer with a little digression. Back in 2017, when Kamala Harris was in the Senate, her office invited me to DC to meet with them to provide advice about the National Quantum Initiative Act, which Kamala was then spearheading. Kamala herself sent regrets that she couldn’t meet me, because she had to be at the Kavanaugh hearings. I have (nerdy, male) friends who did meet her about tech policy and came away with positive impressions.
And, I dunno, does that sound like someone who wants me dead for the crime of having been born a nerdy heterosexual male? Or having awkwardly and ineptly asked women on dates, including the one who became my wife? OK, maybe Amanda Marcotte wants me dead for those crimes. Maybe Arthur Chu does (is he still around?). Good that they’re not running for president then.
Q14: Let me try one more time to show you how much your own party hates you. Which side has been at constant war against the SAT and other standardized tests, and merit-based college admissions, and gifted programs, and academic tracking and acceleration, and STEM magnet schools, and every single other measure by which future young Scott Aaronsons (and Saket Agrawals) might achieve their dreams in life? Has that been our side, or theirs?
A: To be honest, I haven’t seen the Trump or Harris campaigns take any position on any of these issues. Even if they did, there’s very little that the federal government can do: these battles happen in individual states and cities and counties and universities. So I’ll vote for Harris while continuing to advocate for what I think is right in education policy.
Q15: Can you not see that Kamala Harris is a vapid, power-seeking bureaucratic machine—that she has no fixed principles at all? For godsakes, she all but condemned Biden as a racist in the 2020 primary, then agreed to serve as his running mate!
A: I mean, she surely has more principles than Vance does. As far as I can tell, for example, she’s genuinely for abortion rights (as I am). Even if she believed in nothing, though, better a cardboard cutout on which values I recognize are written, than a flesh-and-blood person shouting values that horrify me.
Q16: What, if anything, could Republicans do to get you to vote for them?
A: Reject all nutty conspiracy theories. Fully, 100% commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Acknowledge the empirical reality of human-caused climate change, and the need for both technological and legislative measures to slow it and mitigate its impacts. Support abortion rights, or at least a European-style compromise on abortion. Republicans can keep the anti-wokeness stuff, which actually seems to have become their defining issue. If they do all that, and also the Democrats are taken over by frothing radicals who want to annihilate the state of Israel and abolish the police … that’s, uh, probably the point when I start voting Republican.
Q17: Aha, so you now admit that there exist conceivable circumstances that would cause you to vote Republican! In that case, why did you style yourself “Never-Trump From Here to Eternity”?
A: Tell you what, the day the Republicans (and Trump himself?) repudiate authoritarianism and start respecting election outcomes, is the day I’ll admit my title was hyperbolic.
Q18: In the meantime, will you at least treat us Trump supporters with civility and respect?
A: Not only does civil disagreement not compromise any of my values, it is a value to which I think we should all aspire. And to whatever extent I’ve fallen short of that ideal—even when baited into it—I’m sorry and I’ll try to do better. Certainly, age and experience have taught me that there’s hardly anyone so far gone that I can’t find something on which I agree with them, while disagreeing with most of the rest of the world.
The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth.
All the more reason to ignore all of that, then, and blog instead about the notorious Busy Beaver function! Because holy moly, what news have I got today. For lovers of this super-rapidly-growing sequence of integers, I’ve honored to announce the biggest Busy Beaver development that there’s been since 1983, when I slept in a crib and you booted up your computer using a 5.25-inch floppy. That was the year when Allen Brady determined that BusyBeaver(4) was equal to 107. (Tibor Radó, who invented the Busy Beaver function in the 1960s, quickly proved with his student Shen Lin that the first three values were 1, 6, and 21 respectively. The fourth value was harder.)
Only now, after an additional 41 years, do we know the fifth Busy Beaver value. Today, an international collaboration called bbchallenge is announcing that it’s determined, and even formally verified using the Coq proof system, that BB(5) is equal to 47,176,870—the value that’s been conjectured since 1990, when Heiner Marxen and Jürgen Buntrock discovered a 5-state Turing machine that runs for exactly 47,176,870 steps before halting, when started on a blank tape. The new bbchallenge achievement is to prove that all 5-state Turing machines that run for more steps than 47,176,870, actually run forever—or in other words, that 47,176,870 is the maximum finite number of steps for which any 5-state Turing machine can run. That’s what it means for BB(5) to equal 47,176,870.
For more on this story, see Ben Brubaker’s superb article in Quanta magazine, or bbchallenge’s own announcement. For more background on the Busy Beaver function, see my 2020 survey, or my 2017 big numbers lecture, or my 1999 big numbers essay, or the Googology Wiki page, or Pascal Michel’s survey.
The difficulty in pinning down BB(5) was not just that there are a lot of 5-state Turing machines (16,679,880,978,201 of them to be precise, although symmetries reduce the effective number). The real difficulty is, how do you prove that some given machine runs forever? If a Turing machine halts, you can prove that by simply running it on your laptop until halting (at least if it halts after a “mere” ~47 million steps, which is child’s-play). If, on the other hand, the machine runs forever, via some never-repeating infinite pattern rather than a simple infinite loop, then how do you prove that? You need to find a mathematical reason why it can’t halt, and there’s no systematic method for finding such reasons—that was the great discovery of Gödel and Turing nearly a century ago.
More precisely, the Busy Beaver function grows faster than any function that can be computed, and we know that because if a systematic method existed to compute arbitrary BB(n) values, then we could use that method to determine whether a given Turing machine halts (if the machine has n states, just check whether it runs for more than BB(n) steps; if it does, it must run forever). This is the famous halting problem, which Turing proved to be unsolvable by finite means. The Busy Beaver function is Turing-uncomputability made flesh, a finite function that scrapes the edge of infinity.
There’s also a more prosaic issue. Proofs that particular Turing machines run forever tend to be mind-numbingly tedious. Even supposing you’ve found such a “proof,” why should other people trust it, if they don’t want to spend days staring at the outputs of your custom-written software?
And so for decades, a few hobbyists picked away at the BB(5) problem. One, who goes by the handle “Skelet”, managed to reduce the problem to 43 holdout machines whose halting status was still undetermined. Or maybe only 25, depending who you asked? (And were we really sure about the machines outside those 43?)
The bbchallenge collaboration improved on the situation in two ways. First, it demanded that every proof of non-halting be vetted carefully. While this went beyond the original mandate, a participant named “mxdys” later upped the standard to fully machine-verifiable certificates for every non-halting machine in Coq, so that there could no longer be any serious question of correctness. (This, in turn, was done via “deciders,” programs that were crafted to recognize a specific type of parameterized behavior.) Second, the collaboration used an online forum and a Discord server to organize the effort, so that everyone knew what had been done and what remained to be done.
Despite this, it was far from obvious a priori that the collaboration would succeed. What if, for example, one of the 43 (or however many) Turing machines in the holdout set turned out to encode the Goldbach Conjecture, or one of the other great unsolved problems of number theory? Then the final determination of BB(5) would need to await the resolution of that problem. (We do know, incidentally, that there’s a 27-state Turing machine that encodes Goldbach.)
But apparently the collaboration got lucky. Coq proofs of non-halting were eventually found for all the 5-state holdout machines.
As a sad sidenote, Allen Brady, who determined the value of BB(4), apparently died just a few days before the BB(5) proof was complete. He was doubtful that BB(5) would ever be known. The reason, he wrote in 1988, was that “Nature has probably embedded among the five-state holdout machines one or more problems as illusive as the Goldbach Conjecture. Or, in other terms, there will likely be nonstopping recursive patterns which are beyond our powers of recognition.”
Maybe I should say a little at this point about what the 5-state Busy Beaver—i.e., the Marxen-Buntrock Turing machine that we now know to be the champion—actually does. Interpreted in English, the machine iterates a certain integer function g, which is defined by
g(x) = (5x+18)/3 if x = 0 (mod 3),
g(x) = (5x+22)/3 if x = 1 (mod 3),
g(x) = HALT if x = 2 (mod 3).
Starting from x=0, the machine computes g(0), g(g(0)), g(g(g(0))), and so forth, halting if and if it ever reaches … well, HALT. The machine runs for millions of steps because it so happens that this iteration eventually reaches HALT, but only after a while:
0 → 6 → 16 → 34 → 64 → 114 → 196 → 334 → 564 → 946 → 1584 → 2646 → 4416 → 7366 → 12284 → HALT.
(And also, at each iteration, the machine runs for a number of steps that grows like the square of the number x.)
Some readers might be reminded of the Collatz Conjecture, the famous unsolved problem about whether, if you repeatedly replace a positive integer x by x/2 if x is even or 3x+1 if x is odd, you’ll always eventually reach x=1. As Scott Alexander would say, this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. (Especially not in math!)
It’s a fair question whether humans will ever know the value of BB(6). Pavel Kropitz discovered, a couple years ago, that BB(6) is at least 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 (i.e., 10 raised to itself 15 times). Obviously Kropitz didn’t actually run a 6-state Turing machine for that number of steps until halting! Instead he understood what the machine did—and it turned out to apply an iterative process similar to the g function above, but this time involving an exponential function. And the process could be proven to halt after ~15 rounds of exponentiation.
Meanwhile Tristan Stérin, who coordinated the bbchallenge effort, tells me that a 6-state machine was recently discovered that “iterates the Collatz-like map {3x/2, (3x-1)/2} from the number 8 and halts if and only if the number of odd terms ever gets bigger than twice the number of even terms.” This shows that, in order to determine the value of BB(6), one would first need to prove or disprove the Collatz-like conjecture that that never happens.
Basically, if and when artificial superintelligences take over the world, they can worry about the value of BB(6). And then God can worry about the value of BB(7).
I first learned about the BB function in 1996, when I was 15 years old, from a book called The New Turing Omnibus by A. K. Dewdney. From what I gather, Dewdney would go on to become a nutty 9/11 truther. But that’s irrelevant to the story. What matters was that his book provided my first exposure to many of the key concepts of computer science, and probably played a role in my becoming a theoretical computer scientist at all.
And of all the concepts in Dewdney’s book, the one I liked the most was the Busy Beaver function. What a simple function! You could easily explain its definition to Archimedes, or Gauss, or any of the other great mathematicians of the past. And yet, by using it, you could name definite positive integers (BB(10), for example) incomprehensibly larger than any that they could name.
It was from Dewdney that I learned that the first four Busy Beaver numbers were the unthreatening-looking 1, 6, 21, and 107 … but then that the fifth value was already unknown (!!), and at any rate at least 47,176,870. I clearly remember wondering whether BB(5) would ever be known for certain, and even whether I might be the one to determine it. That was almost two-thirds of my life ago.
As things developed, I played no role whatsoever in the determination of BB(5) … except for this. Tristan Stérin tells me that reading my survey article, The Busy Beaver Frontier, was what inspired him to start and lead the bbchallenge collaboration that finally cracked the problem. It’s hard to express how gratified that makes me.
Why care about determining particular values of the Busy Beaver function? Isn’t this just a recreational programming exercise, analogous to code golf, rather than serious mathematical research?
I like to answer that question with another question: why care about humans landing on the moon, or Mars? Those otherwise somewhat arbitrary goals, you might say, serve as a hard-to-fake gauge of human progress against the vastness of the cosmos. In the same way, the quest to determine the Busy Beaver numbers is one concrete measure of human progress against the vastness of the arithmetical cosmos, a vastness that we learned from Gödel and Turing won’t succumb to any fixed procedure. The Busy Beaver numbers are just … there, Platonically, as surely as 13 was prime long before the first caveman tried to arrange 13 rocks into a nontrivial rectangle and failed. And yet we might never know the sixth of these numbers and only today learned the fifth.
Anyway, huge congratulations to the bbchallenge team on their accomplishment. At a terrifying time for the world, I’m happy that, whatever happens, at least I lived to see this.
Dana, the kids, and I got back to the US last week after a month spent in England and then Israel. We decided to visit Israel because … uhh, we heard there’s never been a better time.
We normally go every year to visit Dana’s family and our many friends there, and to give talks. Various well-meaning friends suggested that maybe we should cancel or postpone this year—given, you know, the situation. To me, though, the situation felt like all the more reason to go. To make Israel seem more and more embattled, dangerous, isolated, abnormal, like not an acceptable place to visit (much less live), in order to crater its economy, demoralize its population, and ultimately wipe it from the face of earth … that is explicitly much of the world’s game plan right now, laid out with shocking honesty since October 7 (a day that also showed us what the “decolonization” will, concretely, look like). So, if I oppose this plan, then how could I look myself in the mirror while playing my tiny part in it? Shouldn’t I instead raise a middle finger to those who’d murder my family, and go?
Besides supporting our friends and relatives, though, I wanted to see the post-October-7 reality for myself, rather than just spending hours per day reading about it on social media. I wanted to form my own impression of the mood in Israel: fiercely determined? angry? hopeless? just carrying on like normal?
Anyway, in two meeting-packed weeks, mostly in Tel Aviv but also in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, I saw stuff that could support any of those narratives. A lot was as I’d expected, but not everything. In the rest of this post, I’ll share eleven observations:
(1) This presumably won’t shock anyone, but in post-October-7 Israel, you indeed can’t escape October 7. Everywhere you look, on every building, in every lobby, hanging from every highway overpass, there are hostage posters and “Bring Them Home Now” signs and yellow ribbons—starting at the airport, where every single passenger is routed through a long corridor of hostage posters, each one signed and decorated by the hostage’s friends and family. It sometimes felt as though Yad Vashem had expanded to encompass the entire country. Virtually everyone we talked to wanted to share their stories and opinions about the war, most of all their depression and anger. While there was also plenty of discussion about quantum error mitigation and watermarking of large language models and local family events, no one even pretended to ignore the war.
(2) Having said that, the morning after we landed, truthfully, the first thing that leapt out at me wasn’t anything to do with October 7, hostages, or Gaza. It was the sheer number of children playing outside, in any direction you looked. Full, noisy playgrounds on block after block. It’s one thing to know intellectually that Israel has by far the highest birthrate of any Western country, another to see it for yourself. The typical secular family probably has three kids; the typical Orthodox family has more. (The Arab population is of course also growing rapidly, both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza.) New apartment construction is everywhere you look in Tel Aviv, despite building delays caused by the war. And it all seems perfectly normal … unless you’ve lived your whole life in environments where 0.8 or 1.2 children per couple is the norm.
This, of course, has giant implications for anyone interested in Israel’s future. It’s like, a million Israeli leftists could get fed up and flee to the US or Canada or Switzerland, and Israel would still have a large and growing Jewish population—because having a big family is “just what people do” in a state that was founded to defy the Holocaust. In particular: anyone who dreams of dismantling the illegal, settler-colonial, fascist Zionist ethnostate, and freeing Palestine from river to sea, had better have some plan for what they’re going to do with all these millions of young Jews, who don’t appear to be going anywhere.
(3) The second thing I noticed was the heat—comparable to the Texas summer heat that we try to escape when possible. Because of the roasting sun, our own two pampered offspring mostly refused to go outside during daytime, and we mostly met friends indoors. I more than once had the dark thought that maybe Israel will survive Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and its own Jewish extremists … only to be finished off in the end (along with much of the rest of the planet) by global warming. I wonder whether Israel will manage to engineer its way out of the crisis, as it dramatically engineered its way out of its water crisis via desalination. The Arab petrostates have been trying to engineer their way out of the Middle East’s increasingly Mercury-like climate, albeit with decidedly mixed results.
(4) But nu, what did our Israeli friends say about the war? Of course it’s a biased sample, because our friends are mostly left-wing academics and tech workers. But, at risk of overgeneralizing: they’re unhappy. Very, very unhappy. As for Bibi and his far-right yes-men? Our friends’ rage at them was truly a sight to behold. American progressives are, like, mildly irked by Trump in comparison. Yes, our friends blame Bibi for the massive security and intelligence failures that allowed October 7 to happen. They blame him for dragging out the war to stave off elections. They blame him for empowering the contemptible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. They blame him for his failure to bring back the remaining hostages. Most of all, they blame him for refusing even to meet with the hostage families, and more broadly, for evading responsibility for all that he did wrong, while arrogating credit for any victories (like the rescue of Noa Argamani).
(5) One Israeli friend offered to take me along to the giant anti-Bibi rally that now happens every Saturday night in Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. (She added that, if I left before 9pm, it would reduce the chances of the police arresting me.) As the intrepid blogger-investigator I am, of course I agreed.
While many of the protesters simply called for new elections to replace Netanyahu (a cause that I 3000% support), others went further, demanding a deal to free the hostages and an immediate end to the war (even if, as they understood, that would leave Hamas in power).
Watching the protesters, smelling their pot smoke that filled the air, I was seized by a thought: these Israeli leftists actually see eye-to-eye with the anti-Israel American leftists on a huge number of issues. In a different world, they could be marching together as allies. Except, of course, for one giant difference: namely, the Tel Aviv protesters are proudly waving Israeli flags (sometimes modified to add anti-Bibi images, or to depict the Star of David “crying”), rather than burning or stomping on those flags. They’re marching to save the Israel that they know and remember, rather than to destroy it.
(6) We did meet one ultra-right-wing (and Orthodox) academic colleague. He was virtually the only person we met on this trip who seemed cheerful and optimistic about Israel’s future. He brought me to his synagogue to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, while he himself stood guarding the door of the synagogue with a gargantuan rifle (his volunteer duty since October 7). He has six kids.
(7) Again and again, our secular liberal friends told us they’re thinking about moving from Israel, because if the Bibi-ists entrench their power (and of course the demographics are trending in that direction), then they don’t see that the country has any worthwhile future for them or their children. Should this be taken more seriously than the many Americans who promise that this time, for real, they’ll move to Canada if Trump wins? I’m not sure. I can only report what I heard.
(8) At the same time, again and again I got the following question from Israelis (including the leftist ones): how bad is the situation for Jews in the US? Have the universities been taken over by militant anti-Zionists, like it shows in the news? I had to answer: it’s complicated. Because I live my life enbubbled in the STEM field of computer science, surrounded by friends and colleagues of many backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and political opinions who are thoughtful and decent (otherwise, why would they be my friends and colleagues?), I’m able to live a very nice life even in the midst of loud protesters calling to globalize the intifada against my family.
If, on the other hand, I were in a typical humanities department? Yeah, then I’d be pretty terrified. My basic options would be to (a) shut up about my (ironically) moderate, middle-of-the-road opinions on Israel/Palestine, such as support for the two-state solution; (b) live a miserable and embattled existence; or (c) pack up and move, for example to Israel.
An astounding irony right now is that, just as Israeli leftists are talking about moving from Israel, some of my American Jewish friends have talked to me about moving to Israel, to escape a prejudice that they thought died with their grandparents. I don’t know where the grass is actually greener (or is it brown everywhere?). Nor do I know how many worriers will actually follow through. What’s clear is that, both in Israel and in the diaspora, Jews are feeling an existential fear that they haven’t felt for generations.
(9) Did I fear for my own family’s safety during the trip? Not really. Maybe I should have. When we visited Haifa, we found that GPS was scrambled all across northern Israel, to make targeting harder for Hezbollah missiles. As a result, we couldn’t use Google Maps, got completely lost driving, and had to change plans with our friends. For the first time, now I really feel angry at Hezbollah: they made my life worse and it’s personal!
The funniest part, though, was how the scrambling was implemented: when you opened Google Maps anywhere in the north, it told you that you were in Beirut. It then dutifully gave you walking or driving directions to wherever you were going in Israel, passing through Syria close to Damascus (“warning: this route passes through multiple countries”).
(10) The most darkly comical thing that I heard on the entire trip: “oh, no, I don’t object in the slightest if the anti-Zionists want to kill us all. I only object if they want to kill us because of an incorrect understanding of the relevant history.” Needless to say, this was a professor.
(11) After my two-week investigation, what grand insight can I offer about Israel’s future? Not much, but maybe this: I think we can definitively rule out the scenario where Israel, having been battered by October 7, and bracing itself to be battered worse by Hezbollah, just sort of … withers away and disappears. Yes, Israel might get hotter, more crowded, more dangerous, more right-wing, and more Orthodox. But it will stay right where it is, unless and until its enemies destroy it in a cataclysmic war. You can’t scare people away, break their will, if they believe they have nowhere else on the planet to go. You can only kill them or else live next to them in peace, as the UN proposed in 1947 and as Oslo proposed in the 1990s. May we live to see peace.
Anyway, on that pleasant note, time soon to tune in to the Trump/Biden debate! I wonder who these two gentlemen are, and what they might stand for?
(See here for Boaz Barak’s obituary, and here for Lance Fortnow’s—they cover different aspects of Luca’s legacy from each other and from this post. Also, click here to register for a free online TCS4All talk that Luca was scheduled to give, and that will now be given in his memory, this Monday at 3:30pm Eastern time.)
Luca Trevisan, one of the world’s leading theoretical computer scientists, has succumbed to cancer in Italy, at only 52 years old. I was privileged to know Luca for a quarter-century, first as my complexity theory and cryptography professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of my dissertation committee, and then as a friend and colleague and fellow CS theory blogger.
I regret that I learned of the seriousness of Luca’s condition only a few days ago. So yesterday morning I wrote him a farewell email, under the impression that, while he was now in hospice care, he had at least a few more weeks. Alas, he probably never saw it. So I’m hereby making the email into a memorial post, with small changes mostly to protect people’s privacy.
Dear Luca,
Dana, the kids, and I were traveling in Israel for the past two weeks, when I received the shocking and sad news that this might be my last chance to write to you.
At risk of stating the obvious — you had a very large and positive effect on my life and career. Starting with the complexity theory summer school at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2000, which was the first time we met and also the first time I really experienced the glories of complexity at full blast. And then continuing at Berkeley, TA’ing your algorithms class, which you had to cancel on 9/11 (although students still somehow showed up for office hours lugging their CLRS books…), and dealing with that student who obviously cheated on the midterm although I had stupidly given back to her the evidence that would prove it.
And then your graduate complexity course, where I was very proud to get 100% on your exam, having handwritten it on a train while everyone else used LaTeX (which, embarrassingly, I was still learning). I was a bit less proud to present the Razborov-Rudich paper to the class, and to get questions from you that proved that I understood it less thoroughly than I thought. I emerged from your course far better prepared to do complexity theory than when I entered it.
Later I took your cryptography course, where I came to you afterwards one day to point out that with a quantum computer, you could pull out big Fourier coefficients without all the bother of the Goldreich-Levin theorem. And you said sure, but then you would need a quantum computer. Over 20 years later, Goldreich and Levin (and you?) can say with satisfaction that we still don’t have that scalable quantum computer … but we’re much much closer, I swear!
I still feel bad about the theory lunch talk I gave in 2003, on my complexity-theoretic version of Aumann’s agreement theorem, where I used you and Umesh as characters instead of Alice and Bob, and which then led to unintended references to “Luca’s posterior” (probability distribution, I meant).
I also feel bad about delaying so long the completion of my PhD thesis, until well after I’d started my postdoc in Princeton, so that my former officemate needed to meet you on a street corner in San Francisco to sign the signature page the night before the deadline.
But then a few years later, when Avi and I did the algebrization paper, the fact that you seemed to like it mattered more to me than just about anything else.
Thank you for the excellent dinner when I met you some years ago in Rome. Thank you for the Trevisan-Tulsiani-Vadhan paper, which answered a question we had about BosonSampling (and you probably didn’t even know you were doing quantum computing when you wrote that paper!). Thank you for your blog. Thank you for everything you did for me.
I always enjoyed your dry humor, much of which might sadly be lost to time, unless others wrote it down or it’s on YouTube or something. Two examples spring to my mind across the decades:
“From my previous lecture, you may have gotten the impression that everything in derandomization is due to Nisan and Wigderson, but this is not the case: Avi has been working with other people as well.”
After I’d explained that I’d be spending a semester in Jerusalem to work with Avi, despite (at that time) knowing only the most rudimentary Hebrew, such as how to say “please” and “excuse me”: “you mean there are words in Hebrew for ‘please’ and ‘excuse me’?”
Speaking of which, my current trip to Israel has given me many opportunities to reflect on mortality — for all the obvious war-related reasons of course, but also because while we were here, we unexpectedly had to attend two shivas of people in our social circle who died during our trip, one of them from cancer. And we learned about a close friend whose stepson has a brain tumor and might or might not make it. Cancer is a bitch.
Anyway, there’s much more I could write, but I imagine you’re getting flooded with emails right now from all the people whose lives you’ve touched, so I won’t take up more of your time. You’ve made a real difference to the world, to theoretical computer science, and to your friends and colleagues, one that many people would envy.
Best,
Scott | |||||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 43 | https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Courses/134/history.html | en | History of Computer Science | [
"http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/atwork.gif"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | A Very Brief History of Computer Science
Written by Jeffrey Shallit for CS 134 at the University of Waterloo in the summer of 1995.
This little web page was hastily stitched together in a few days. Perhaps eventually I will get around to doing a really good job. Suggestions are always welcome.
Before 1900
People have been using mechanical devices to aid calculation for thousands of years. For example, the abacus probably existed in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) about 3000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks developed some very sophisticated analog computers. In 1901, an ancient Greek shipwreck was discovered off the island of Antikythera. Inside was a salt-encrusted device (now called the Antikythera mechanism) that consisted of rusted metal gears and pointers. When this c. 80 B.C.E. device was reconstructed, it produced a mechanism for predicting the motions of the stars and planets.
John Napier (1550-1617), the Scottish inventor of logarithms, invented Napier's rods (sometimes called "Napier's bones") c. 1610 to simplify the task of multiplication.
In 1641 the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) built a mechanical adding machine. Similar work was done by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz also advocated use of the binary system for doing calculations.
Recently it was discovered that Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), a graduate of the University of Tübingen (Germany), constructed such a device in 1623-4, before both Pascal and Leibniz. A brief description of the device is contained in two letters to Johannes Kepler. Unfortunately, at least one copy of the machine burned up in a fire, and Schickard himself died of bubonic plague in 1635, during the Thirty Years' War.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) invented a loom that could weave complicated patterns described by holes in punched cards. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) worked on two mechanical devices: the Difference Engine and the far more ambitious Analytical Engine (a precursor of the modern digital computer), but neither worked satisfactorily. (Babbage was a bit of an eccentric -- one biographer calls him an "irascible genius" -- and was probably the model for Daniel Doyce in Charles Dickens' novel, Little Dorrit. A little-known fact about Babbage is that he invented the science of dendrochronology -- tree-ring dating -- but never pursued his invention. In his later years, Babbage devoted much of his time to the persecution of street musicians (organ-grinders).) The Difference Engine can be viewed nowadays in the Science Museum in London, England.
One of Babbage's friends, Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), sometimes is called the "first programmer" because of a report she wrote on Babbage's machine. (The programming language Ada was named for her.)
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), a British economist and logician, built a machine in 1869 to solve logic problems. It was "the first such machine with sufficient power to solve a complicated problem faster than the problem could be solved without the machine's aid." (Gardner) It is now in the Oxford Museum of the History of Science.
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) invented the modern punched card for use in a machine he designed to help tabulate the 1890 census.
1900 - 1939: The Rise of Mathematics
Work on calculating machines continued. Some special-purpose calculating machines were built. For example, in 1919, E. O. Carissan (1880-1925), a lieutenant in the French infantry, designed and had built a marvelous mechanical device for factoring integers and testing them for primality. The Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) built some electromechanical calculating devices, including one that played simple chess endgames.
In 1928, the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) addressed the International Congress of Mathematicians. He posed three questions: (1) Is mathematics complete; i.e. can every mathematical statement be either proved or disproved? (2) Is mathematics consistent, that is, is it true that statements such as "0 = 1" cannot be proved by valid methods? (3) Is mathematics decidable, that is, is there a mechanical method that can be applied to any mathematical assertion and (at least in principle) will eventually tell whether that assertion is true or not? This last question was called the Entscheidungsproblem.
In 1931, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) answered two of Hilbert's questions. He showed that every sufficiently powerful formal system is either inconsistent or incomplete. Also, if an axiom system is consistent, this consistency cannot be proved within itself. The third question remained open, with 'provable' substituted for 'true'.
In 1936, Alan Turing (1912-1954) provided a solution to Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem by constructing a formal model of a computer -- the Turing machine -- and showing that there were problems such a machine could not solve. One such problem is the so-called "halting problem": given a Pascal program, does it halt on all inputs?
1940's: Wartime brings the birth of the electronic digital computer
The calculations required for ballistics during World War II spurred the development of the general-purpose electronic digital computer. At Harvard, Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) built the Mark I electromechanical computer in 1944, with the assistance of IBM.
Military code-breaking also led to computational projects. Alan Turing was involved in the breaking of the code behind the German machine, the Enigma, at Bletchley Park in England. The British built a computing device, the Colossus, to assist with code-breaking.
At Iowa State University in 1939, John Vincent Atanasoff (1904-1995) and Clifford Berry designed and built an electronic computer for solving systems of linear equations, but it never worked properly.
Atanasoff discussed his invention with John William Mauchly (1907-1980), who later, with J. Presper Eckert, Jr. (1919-1995), designed and built the ENIAC, a general-purpose electronic computer originally intended for artillery calculations. Exactly what ideas Mauchly got from Atanasoff is not complely clear, and whether Atanasoff or Mauchly and Eckert deserve credit as the originators of the electronic digital computer was the subject of legal battles and ongoing historical debate. The ENIAC was built at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania, and was finished in 1946.
In 1944, Mauchly, Eckert, and John von Neumann (1903-1957) were already at work designing a stored-program electronic computer, the EDVAC. Von Neumann's report, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", was very influential and contains many of the ideas still used in most modern digital computers, including a mergesort routine. Eckert and Mauchly went on to build UNIVAC.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) built the first operational, general-purpose, program-controlled calculator, the Z3, in 1941. More information about Zuse can be found here.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a surprisingly prescient article in the Atlantic Monthly about the ways information processing would affect the society of the future. (Another copy of the Bush article appears here.)
Maurice Wilkes (b. 1913), working in Cambridge, England, built the EDSAC, a computer based on the EDVAC. F. C. Williams (b. 1911) and others at Manchester University built the Manchester Mark I, one version of which was working as early as June 1948. This machine is sometimes called the first stored-program digital computer.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen (1908-1991), Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and William Shockley (1910-1989) transformed the computer and made possible the microprocessor revolution. For this discovery they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. (Shockley later became notorious for his racist views.)
Jay Forrester (b. 1918) invented magnetic core memory c. 1949. More about Forrester here.
1950's
Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) invented the notion of a compiler, at Remington Rand, in 1951. Earlier, in 1947, Hopper found the first computer "bug" -- a real one -- a moth that had gotten into the Harvard Mark II. (Actually, the use of "bug" to mean defect goes back to at least 1889.)
John Backus and others developed the first FORTRAN compiler in April 1957. LISP, a list-processing language for artificial intelligence programming, was invented by John McCarthy about 1958. Alan Perlis, John Backus, Peter Naur and others developed Algol.
In hardware, Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) invented the integrated circuit in 1959.
Edsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths in graphs as a demonstration of the ARMAC computer in 1956. He also invented an efficient algorithm for the minimum spanning tree in order to minimize the wiring needed for the X1 computer. (Dijkstra is famous for his caustic, opinionated memos. For example, see his opinions of some programming languages).
In a famous paper that appeared in the journal Mind in 1950, Alan Turing introduced the Turing Test, one of the first efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. He proposed a definition of "thinking" or "consciousness" using a game: a tester would have to decide, on the basis of written conversation, whether the entity in the next room responding to the tester's queries was a human or a computer. If this distinction could not be made, then it could be fairly said that the computer was "thinking".
In 1952, Alan Turing was arrested for "gross indecency" after a burglary led to the discovery of his affair with Arnold Murray. Overt homosexuality was taboo in 1950's England, and Turing was forced to take estrogen "treatments" which rendered him impotent and caused him to grow breasts. On June 7, 1954, despondent over his situation, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
1960's
In the 1960's, computer science came into its own as a discipline. In fact, the term was coined by George Forsythe, a numerical analyst. The first computer science department was formed at Purdue University in 1962. The first person to receive a Ph. D. from a computer science department was Richard Wexelblat, at the University of Pennsylvania, in December 1965.
Operating systems saw major advances. Fred Brooks at IBM designed System/360, a line of different computers with the same architecture and instruction set, from small machine to top-of-the-line. Edsger Dijkstra at Eindhoven designed the THE multiprogramming system.
At the end of the decade, ARPAnet, a precursor to today's Internet, began to be constructed.
Many new programming languages were invented, such as BASIC (developed c. 1964 by John Kemeny (1926-1992) and Thomas Kurtz (b. 1928)).
The 1960's also saw the rise of automata theory and the theory of formal languages. Big names here include Noam Chomsky and Michael Rabin. Chomsky later became well-known for his theory that language is "hard-wired" in human brains, and for his criticism of American foreign policy.
Proving correctness of programs using formal methods also began to be more important in this decade. The work of Tony Hoare played an important role. Hoare also invented Quicksort.
Douglas C. Engelbart invents the computer mouse c. 1968, at SRI.
Ted Hoff (b. 1937) and Federico Faggin at Intel designed the first microprocessor (computer on a chip) in 1969-1971.
A rigorous mathematical basis for the analysis of algorithms began with the work of Donald Knuth (b. 1938), author of 3-volume treatise entitled The Art of Computer Programming.
1970's
The theory of databases saw major advances with the work of Edgar F. Codd on relational databases. Codd won the Turing award in 1981.
Unix, a very influential operating system, was developed at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson (b. 1943) and Dennis Ritchie (b. 1941). Brian Kernighan and Ritchie together developed C, an influential programming language.
Other new programming languages, such as Pascal (invented by Niklaus Wirth) and Ada (developed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah), arose.
The first RISC architecture was begun by John Cocke in 1975, at the Thomas J. Watson Laboratories of IBM. Similar projects started at Berkeley and Stanford around this time.
The 1970's also saw the rise of the supercomputer. Seymour Cray (b. 1925) designed the CRAY-1, which was first shipped in March 1976. It could perform 160 million operations in a second. The Cray XMP came out in 1982. Cray Research was taken over by Silicon Graphics.
There were also major advances in algorithms and computational complexity. In 1971, Steve Cook published his seminal paper on NP-completeness, and shortly thereafter, Richard Karp showed that many natural combinatorial problems were NP-complete. Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman published a paper that introduced the theory of public-key cryptography, and a public-key cryptosystem known as RSA was invented by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.
In 1979, three graduate students in North Carolina developed a distributed news server which eventually became Usenet.
1980's
This decade also saw the rise of the personal computer, thanks to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computer.
The first computer viruses are developed c. 1981. The term was coined by Leonard Adleman, now at the University of Southern California.
In 1981, the first truly successful portable computer was marketed, the Osborne I. In 1984, Apple first marketed the Macintosh computer.
In 1987, the US National Science Foundation started NSFnet, precursor to part of today's Internet.
1990's and Beyond
Parallel computers continue to be developed.
Biological computing, with the recent work of Len Adleman on doing computations via DNA, has great promise. The Human Genome Project is attempting to sequence all the DNA in a single human being.
Quantum computing gets a boost with the discovery by Peter Shor that integer factorization can be performed efficiently on a (theoretical) quantum computer.
The "Information Superhighway" links more and more computers worldwide.
Computers get smaller and smaller; the birth of nano-technology.
Other Web Resources for History of Computer Science | ||||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 19 | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/ | en | Quantum Computing (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | [
"https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sep-man-red.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/Blochsphere.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/cnot1.jpg",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/Had1.png",
"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/djalgo.png",
"h... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | en | null | 1. A Brief History of the Field
1.1 Physical Computational Complexity
A mathematical model for a universal computer was defined long before the invention of quantum computers and is called the Turing machine. It consists of (a) an unbounded tape divided (in one dimension) into cells, (b) a “read-write head” capable of reading or writing one of a finite number of symbols from or to a cell at a specific location, and (c) an instruction table (instantiating a transition function) which, given the machine’s initial “state of mind” (one of a finite number of such states that can be visited any number of times in the course of a computation) and the input read from the tape in that state, determines (i) the symbol to be written to the tape at the current head position, (ii) the subsequent displacement (to the left or to the right) of the head, and (iii) the machine’s final state. In 1936 Turing (1936) showed that since one can encode the instruction table of any given Turing machine \(T\) as a binary number \(\#(T)\), there exists a universal Turing machine \(U\) which, upon reading a given \(\#(T)\) from its tape, can simulate the operation of \(T\) on any input.
In mathematics, an effective method, informally speaking, is a method consisting of a finite number of precise finite-length instructions, guaranteed to produce some desired result in a finite number of steps if followed exactly by a human being using nothing other than paper and pencil (Papayannopoulos 2023). That the Turing machine model formally captures the concept of effective calculability in its entirety is the essence of the Church-Turing thesis. Since the thesis involves both a precise mathematical notion (i.e., that of a Turing machine) and an informal and intuitive notion (i.e., that of an effective method), however, strictly speaking it cannot be proved or disproved but is arguably best thought of as an explication in Carnap’s sense (Carnap 1962, ch. I).
Simple cardinality considerations show, in any case, that not all functions are Turing-computable (the set of all Turing machines is countable, while the set of all functions from the natural numbers to the natural numbers is not), and the discovery of this fact came as a complete surprise in the 1930s (Davis 1958). But as interesting and important as the question of whether a given function is computable by Turing machine—the purview of computability theory (Boolos, Burgess, & Jeffrey 2007)—is, it is not the only question that interests computer scientists. Beginning especially in the 1960s (Cobham 1965; Edmonds 1965; Hartmanis & Stearns 1965), the question of the cost of computing a function also came to be of great importance. This cost, also known as computational complexity, is measured naturally in terms of the physical resources (in particular time and space, given in terms of computational steps and memory locations, respectively) required in order to solve the computational problem at hand. Computer scientists classify computational problems according to the way their cost function behaves as a function of their input size, \(n\) (the number of bits required to store the input). Tractable, or efficiently solvable, problems are those that can be solved in “polynomial time”; i.e., in a number of time steps that is bounded by a polynomial function of the size of the input, while intractable problems are those which cannot, i.e., that require “exponential” time.
For a deterministic Turing machine (DTM) like the ones we have been discussing so far, its behaviour at any given time is wholly determined by its state plus whatever its input happens to be. In other words such machines have a unique transition function. We can generalise the Turing model, however, by allowing a machine to instantiate more than one transition function simultaneously. A nondeterministic Turing machine (NTM), upon being presented with a given input in a given state, is allowed to ‘choose’ which of its transition functions to follow, and we say that it solves a given problem whenever, given some input, there exists at least one path through its state space leading to a solution. Exactly how an NTM “chooses” whether to follow one transition function rather than another at a given moment in time is left undefined (Turing originally conceived these choices as those of an external operator). In particular, we do not assume that any probabilities are attached to these choices. In a probabilistic Turing machine (PTM), by contrast, we characterise the computer’s choices by associating a particular probability with each of its possible transitions.
Probabilistic and deterministic Turing machines (DTMs) have different success criteria. A successful deterministic algorithm for a given problem is guaranteed to yield the correct answer given its input. Of a successful probabilistic algorithm, on the other hand, we only demand that it yield a correct answer with “high” probability (minimally, we demand that it be strictly greater than 1/2). It was generally believed, until relatively recently, that for some problems (see, e.g. Rabin 1976) probabilistic algorithms are dramatically more efficient than any deterministic alternative; in other words that the set or “class” of problems efficiently solvable by PTM is larger than the class of problems efficiently solvable by DTM. It is now generally believed that the PTM model does not, in fact, offer a computational advantage in this sense over the DTM model (Arora & Barak 2009, ch. 20). Probabilistic (Turing) computation is nevertheless interesting to consider, because abstractly a quantum computer is just a variation on the PTM that does appear to offer computational advantages over deterministic computation, although as already mentioned this conjecture still awaits a proof.
The class \(\mathbf{P}\) (for Polynomial) is the class containing all the computational decision problems that can be solved by a DTM in polynomial time. The class NP (for Non-deterministic Polynomial) is the class containing all the computational decision problems that can be solved by an NTM in polynomial time.[1] The most famous problems in NP are called “NP-complete”, where “complete” designates the fact that these problems stand or fall together: Either they are all tractable, or none of them is! If we knew how to solve an NP-complete problem efficiently (i.e., with polynomial cost) we could use it to efficiently solve any other problem in NP (Cook 1971). Today we know of hundreds of examples of NP-complete problems (Garey & Johnson 1979), all of which are reducible one to another with no more than a polynomial slowdown. Since the best known algorithm for any of these problems is exponential, the widely believed conjecture is that there is no polynomial algorithm that can solve them. Clearly \(\mathbf{P} \subseteq \mathbf{NP}\). Proving or disproving the conjecture that \(\mathbf{P} \ne \mathbf{NP}\), however, remains perhaps one of the most important open questions in computer science. The class BPP (bounded probabilistic polynomial) is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time with “high” probability (see above) by a PTM. Finally, the class BQP is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time with “high” probability by a quantum computer. From the perspective of computer science, answering the question of whether quantum computers are more powerful than classical computers amounts to determining whether BPP \(\subsetneq\) BQP is true (see Cuffaro 2018b).
Although the original Church-Turing thesis involves the abstract mathematical notion of computability, physicists as well as computer scientists often interpret it as saying something about the scope and limitations of physical computing machines. Wolfram (1985) claims that any physical system can be simulated (to any degree of approximation) by a universal Turing machine, and that complexity bounds on Turing machine simulations have physical significance. For example, if the computation of the minimum energy of some system of \(n\) particles requires at least an exponentially increasing number of steps in \(n\), then the actual relaxation of this system to its minimum energy state will also take exponential time. Aharonov (1999) strengthens this thesis (in the context of showing its putative incompatibility with quantum mechanics) when she says that a PTM can simulate any reasonable physical device at polynomial cost.
In order for the “physical Church-Turing thesis” to make sense one has to relate physical space and time parameters to their computational counterparts: memory capacity and number of computation steps, respectively. There are various ways to do that, leading to different formulations of the thesis (see Copeland 2018; Gandy 1980; Pitowsky 1990; Sieg & Byrnes 1999). For example, one can encode the set of instructions of a universal Turing machine and the state of its infinite tape in the binary development of the position coordinates of a single particle. Consequently, one can physically ‘realise’ a universal Turing machine as a billiard ball with hyperbolic mirrors (Moore 1990; Pitowsky 1996).
It should be stressed that strictly speaking there is no relation between the original Church-Turing thesis and its physical version (Pitowsky & Shagrir 2003), and while the former concerns the concept of computation that is relevant to logic (since it is strongly tied to the notion of proof which requires validation), it does not analytically entail that all computations should be subject to validation. Indeed, there is a long historical tradition of analog computations (Dewdney 1984; Maley 2023; Papayannopoulos 2020), and the output of these computations is validated either by repetitive “runs” or by validating the physical theory that presumably governs the behaviour of the analog computer.
1.2 Physical “Short-cuts” of Computation
Do physical processes exist which contradict the physical Church-Turing thesis? Apart from analog computation, there exist at least two main kinds of example purporting to show that the notion of recursion, or Turing-computability, is not a natural physical property (Hogarth 1994; Pitowsky 1990; Pour-el & Richards 1981). Although the physical systems involved (a specific initial condition for the wave equation in three dimensions and an exotic solution to Einstein’s field equations, respectively) are somewhat contrived, a school of “hypercomputation” that aspires to extend the limited examples of physical “hypercomputers” and in so doing to physically “compute” the non-Turing-computable has nevertheless emerged (Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Németi, & Székely 2018; Copeland 2002, 2011; Davis 2003). Quantum hypercomputation is less frequently discussed in the literature (see, e.g., Adamyan, Calude, & Pavlov 2004), but arguably the most concrete attempt to harness quantum theory to compute the non-computable is the suggestion to use the quantum adiabatic algorithm (see below) to solve Hilbert’s Tenth Problem (Kieu 2002, 2004)—a Turing-undecidable problem equivalent to the halting problem—though this alleged quantum adiabatic hypercomputer has been criticised as unphysical (see Hagar & Korolev 2007; Hodges 2005 [Other Internet Resources]).
Setting aside hypercomputers, even if we restrict ourselves only to Turing-computable functions, one can still find many proposals in the literature that purport to display “short-cuts” in computational resources. Consider, e.g., the DNA model of computation that was claimed (Adleman 1994; Lipton 1995) to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. A closer inspection shows that the cost of the computation in this model is still exponential since the number of molecules in the physical system grows exponentially with the size of the problem. Or take an allegedly instantaneous solution to another NP-complete problem using a construction of rods and balls (Vergis, Steiglitz, & Dickinson 1986) that unfortunately ignores the accumulating time-delays in the rigid rods that result in an exponential overall slowdown. It appears that these and other similar models cannot serve as counter-examples to the physical Church-Turing thesis (as far as complexity is concerned) since they all require some exponential physical resource. Note, however, that all these models are described using classical physics, hence the unavoidable question: Can the shift to quantum physics allow us to find computational short-cuts? The quest for the quantum computer began with the possibility of giving a positive answer to this question.
1.3 Milestones
As early as 1969 Steven Wiesner suggested quantum information processing as a possible way to better accomplish cryptologic tasks. But the first four published papers on quantum information (Wiesner published his only in 1983), belong to Alexander Holevo (1973), R. P. Poplavskii (1975), Roman Ingarden (1976), and Yuri Manin (1980). Better known are contributions made in the early 1980s by Charles H. Bennett of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Paul A. Benioff of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, and Richard P. Feynman of the California Institute of Technology. The idea emerged when scientists were investigating the fundamental physical limits of computation: If technology continued to abide by “Moore’s Law” (the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every 18 months since the integrated circuit was invented), then the continually shrinking size of circuitry packed onto silicon chips would eventually reach a point where individual elements would be no larger than a few atoms. But since the physical laws that govern the behaviour and properties of the putative circuit at the atomic scale are inherently quantum-mechanical in nature, not classical, the natural question arose whether a new kind of computer could be devised based on the principles of quantum physics.
Inspired by Ed Fredkin’s ideas on reversible computation (see Hagar 2016), Feynman was among the first to attempt to provide an answer to this question by producing an abstract model in 1982 that showed how a quantum system could be used to do computations. He also explained how such a machine would be able to act as a simulator for quantum physics, conjecturing that any classical computer could do the same task only inefficiently. In 1985, David Deutsch proposed the first universal quantum Turing machine, which paved the way to the quantum circuit model (Deutsch 1989) and the development of quantum algorithms.
The 1990s saw the discovery of the Deutsch-Josza algorithm (1992) and of Simon’s algorithm (1994). The latter supplied the basis for Shor’s factoring algorithm. Published in 1994, this algorithm marked a “phase transition” in the development of quantum computing and sparked a tremendous interest even outside the physics community. In that year the first experimental realisation of the quantum CNOT (controlled-not) gate with trapped ions was proposed by Cirac & Zoller (1995). In 1995, Peter Shor and Andrew Steane proposed (independently) the first scheme for quantum error-correction. In that same year the first realisation of a quantum logic gate was done in Boulder, Colorado, following Cirac and Zoller’s proposal. In 1996, Lov Grover from Bell Labs invented a quantum search algorithm which yields a provable (though only quadratic) “speed-up” compared to its classical counterparts. A year later the first model for quantum computation based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques was proposed. This technique was realised in 1998 with a 2-qubit register, and was scaled up to 7 qubits in the Los Alamos National Lab in 2000.
The adiabatic and cluster-state models of quantum computing were discovered in 2000 and 2002, respectively (Farhi, Goldstone, Gutmann, & Sipser 2000; Raussendorf & Briegel 2002) and in 2011 D-Wave systems announced the creation of “D-Wave one,” an adiabatic quantum computer system running on a 128-qubit processor (Johnson, Amin, Gildert, et al. 2011). The late 2010s saw the beginning of the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) era (Preskill 2018), and in 2019 scientists affiliated with Google LLC announced (Arute, Arya, Babbush, & coauthors 2019) that they had achieved “quantum computational supremacy” (Aaronson 2019 [Other Internet Resources])—the actual existence of a (in this case, NISQ) quantum computer capable of solving a specific problem for which no efficient classical algorithm is known—at least until 2022 when a classical algorithm to outperform Google LLC’s quantum computer was discovered (Pan, Chen, & Zhang 2022), not to mention subsequent theoretical results demonstrating the inherent limitations of Google LLC’s approach (Aharonov, Gao, Landau, Liu, & Vazirani 2023). Despite the tremendous growth of the field since the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, the basic questions remain open even today: (1) theoretically, can quantum algorithms efficiently solve classically intractable problems? (2) operationally, can we actually realise a large scale quantum computer to run these algorithms?
2. Basics
In this section we review the basic paradigm for quantum algorithms, namely the quantum circuit model, which comprises the basic quantum unit of information (the qubit) and the basic logical manipulations thereof (quantum gates). For more detailed introductions see Nielsen & Chuang (2010) and Mermin (2007).
2.1 The Qubit
The qubit is the quantum analogue of the bit, the classical fundamental unit of information. It is a mathematical object with specific properties that can be realised in an actual physical system in many different ways. Just as the classical bit has a state—either 0 or 1—a qubit also has a state. Yet contrary to the classical bit, \(\lvert 0\rangle\) and \(\lvert 1\rangle\) are but two possible states of the qubit, and any linear combination (superposition) thereof is also possible. In general, thus, the physical state of a qubit is the superposition \(\lvert\psi \rangle = \alpha \lvert 0\rangle + \beta \lvert 1\rangle\) (where \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are complex numbers). The state of a qubit can be described as a vector in a two-dimensional Hilbert space, a complex vector space (see the entry on quantum mechanics). The special states \(\lvert 0\rangle\) and \(\lvert 1\rangle\) are known as the computational basis states, and form an orthonormal basis for this vector space. According to quantum theory, when we try to measure the qubit in this basis in order to determine its state, we get either \(\lvert 0\rangle\) with probability \(\lvert \alpha\rvert^2\) or \(\lvert 1\rangle\) with probability \(\lvert \beta\rvert^2\). Since \(\lvert \alpha\rvert^2 + \lvert\beta\rvert^2 = 1\) (i.e., the qubit is a unit vector in the aforementioned two-dimensional Hilbert space), we may (ignoring the overall phase factor) effectively write its state as \(\lvert \psi \rangle =\) cos\((\theta)\lvert 0\rangle + e^{i\phi}\)sin\((\theta)\lvert 1\rangle\), where the numbers \(\theta\) and \(\phi\) define a point on the unit three-dimensional sphere, as shown in the figure below. This sphere is typically called the Bloch sphere, and it provides a useful means to visualise the state space of a single qubit.
Since \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are complex and therefore continuous variables one might think that a single qubit is capable of storing an infinite amount of information. When measured, however, it yields only the classical result (0 or 1) with certain probabilities specified by the quantum state. In other words, the measurement changes the state of the qubit, “collapsing” it from a superposition to one of its terms. In fact one can prove (Holevo 1973) that the amount of information actually retrievable from a single qubit (what Timpson (2013, 47ff.) calls its “accessible information”) is no more than one bit. If the qubit is not measured, however, the amount of “hidden” information it “stores” (what Timpson calls its “specification information”) is conserved under its (unitary) dynamical evolution. This feature of quantum mechanics allows one to manipulate the information stored in unmeasured qubits with quantum gates (i.e. unitary transformations), and is one of the sources for the putative power of quantum computers.
As an illustration, let us suppose we have two qubits at our disposal. A pair of qubits has four computational basis states: {\(\lvert 00\rangle, \lvert 01\rangle, \lvert 10\rangle, \lvert 11\rangle\)}. If these were classical bits, they would represent the four physically possible states of the system. But a pair of qubits can also exist in what can be described as a superposition of these four basis states, each of which has its own complex coefficient (whose mod square, being interpreted as a probability, is normalised). As long as the quantum system evolves unitarily and is unmeasured, it can be imagined to “store” that many bits of (specification) information. The difficult task, however, is to use this information efficiently in light of the bound on the state’s accessible information.
2.2 Quantum Gates
Classical computational gates are Boolean logic gates that manipulate information stored in bits. In quantum computing such gates are represented by matrices, and can be visualised as rotations over the Bloch sphere. This visualisation represents the fact that quantum gates are unitary operators, i.e., they preserve the norm of the quantum state (i.e., \(U^{\dagger}U=I\), where \(U\) is a linear operator representing a quantum gate and \(U^{\dagger}\) is its adjoint). In classical computing some gates are “universal”. For instance, all of the possible logical connections between two inputs A and B can be realised using some string of NAND gates (which each evaluate the function “not both A and B”). Another universal gate is NOR. In the context of quantum computing it was shown (DiVincenzo 1995) that two-qubit gates (i.e. that transform two qubits) are sufficient to realise any quantum circuit, in the sense that a circuit composed exclusively from (a small set of) one- and two-qubit gates can approximate to arbitrary accuracy any unitary transformation of \(n\) qubits. Barenco et. al. (1995) showed in particular that any multiple-qubit logic gate may be composed in this sense from a combination of single-qubit gates and the two-qubit controlled-not (CNOT) gate, which either flips or preserves its “target” input bit depending on the state of its “control” input bit (specifically: in a CNOT gate the output state of the target qubit is the result of an operation analogous to the classical exclusive-OR (XOR) gate on the inputs). One general feature of quantum gates that distinguishes them from classical gates is that they are always reversible: the inverse of a unitary matrix is also a unitary matrix, and thus a quantum gate can always be inverted by another quantum gate.
\[ \textrm{CNOT} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \end{array} \right]. \]
The CNOT Gate
Unitary gates manipulate information stored in the “quantum register”—a quantum system—and in this sense ordinary (unitary) quantum evolution can be regarded as a computation. In order to read the result of this computation, however, the quantum register must be measured. Measurement is represented as a non-unitary gate that “collapses” the quantum superposition in the register onto one of its terms with a probability corresponding to that term’s complex coefficient. Usually this is described with respect to the computational basis, but in principle a measurement could be carried out in any of the infinitely many possible orthonormal bases with respect to which a given state \(| \psi \rangle\) can be expressed as a linear combination of basis states. It so happens that some such measurements are more difficult to implement than others.
2.3 Quantum Circuits
Quantum circuits are similar to classical computer circuits in that they consist of logical wires and gates. The wires are used to carry the information, while the gates manipulate it (note that the wires are abstract and do not necessarily correspond to physical wires; they may correspond to a physical particle, e.g. a photon, moving from one location to another in space, or even to time-evolution). Conventionally, the input of the quantum circuit is assumed to be a number of qubits each initialised to a computational basis state (typically \(\lvert 0\rangle\)). The output state of the circuit is then measured in some orthonormal basis (usually the computational basis).
The first quantum algorithms (i.e., Deutsch-Jozsa, Simon, Shor and Grover) were constructed in this paradigm. Additional paradigms for quantum computing exist today that differ from the circuit model in many interesting ways. So far, however, they all have been demonstrated to be computationally equivalent to the circuit model (see below), in the sense that any computational problem that can be solved by the circuit model can be solved by these new models with only a polynomial overhead in computational resources. We note the parallel here with the various classical computational models, for which it is also the case that any “reasonable” such model can be efficiently simulated by any other (for discussion, see Cuffaro 2018b, 274).
3 Quantum Algorithms
Algorithm design is a highly complicated task, and in quantum computing, delicately leveraging the features of quantum mechanics in order to make an algorithm more efficient makes the task even more complicated. But before discussing this aspect of quantum algorithm design, let us first convince ourselves that quantum computers can actually simulate classical computation. In some sense this is obvious, given the belief in the universal character of quantum mechanics, and the observation that any quantum computation that is diagonal in the computational basis, i.e., that involves no interference between the qubits, is effectively classical. Yet the demonstration that quantum circuits can be used to simulate classical circuits is not straightforward (recall that the former are always reversible while the latter use gates which are in general irreversible). Indeed, quantum circuits cannot be used directly to simulate classical computation, but the latter can still be simulated on a quantum computer using an intermediate gate, namely the Toffoli gate. This universal classical gate has three input bits and three output bits. Two of the input bits are control bits, unaffected by the action of the gate. The third input bit is a target bit that is flipped if both control bits are set to 1, and otherwise is left alone. This gate is reversible (its inverse is itself), but by stringing a number of such gates together one can simulate any classical circuit. Consequently, using the quantum version of the Toffoli gate (which by definition permutes the computational basis states similarly to the classical Toffoli gate) one can simulate, although rather tediously, irreversible classical logic gates with quantum reversible ones. Quantum computers are thus capable of performing any computation which a classical deterministic computer can do.
What about probabilistic computation? Not surprisingly, a quantum computer can also simulate this type of computation by using another famous quantum gate, namely the Hadamard gate, a single-qubit gate that takes the input state \(\lvert 0\rangle\) to \(\frac{\lvert 0\rangle + \lvert 1\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}\) and the input state \(\lvert 1\rangle\) to \(\frac{\lvert 0\rangle - \lvert 1\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}\). Measuring either of these output states yields \(\lvert 0\rangle\) or \(\lvert 1\rangle\) with 50/50 probability, which can be used to simulate a fair coin toss.
\[ H = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left[ \begin{array}{cc} 1 & 1 \\ 1 & -1 \end{array}\right] \]
The Hadamard Gate
Obviously, if quantum algorithms could be used only to simulate classical algorithms the interest in them would be far more limited than it currently is. But while there may always be some computational problems that resist quantum speed-up (see Myers 1997 and Linden & Popescu 1998 [Other Internet Resources]), there is a general confidence in the community that quantum algorithms may not only simulate classical ones, but that they will actually outperform the latter in some cases, with debatable (Cuffaro 2018b; Hagar 2007) implications for our abstract notions of tractability and intractability.
3.1 Quantum Circuit-Based Algorithms
3.1.1 Oracles
The first quantum algorithms were designed to solve problems which essentially involve the use of an “oracle”, so let us begin by explaining this term. An oracle is a conceptual device that has proven useful in the complexity-theoretic analysis of computational problems, which one can think of as a kind of imaginary magic black box (Arora & Barak 2009, 72–73; Aaronson 2013a, 29ff.) to which, like the famous oracle at Delphi, one poses (yes or no) questions. Unlike that ancient oracle, the oracles considered in computer science always return an answer in a single time step. For example, we can imagine an oracle to determine whether a given Boolean formula is satisfiable or not: Given as input the description of a particular propositional formula, the oracle outputs—in a single time step—a single bit indicating whether or not there is a truth-value assignment satisfying that formula. Obviously such a machine does not really exist—SAT (short for satisfiability) is an NP-complete problem—but that is not the point. The point of using such imaginary devices is to abstract away from certain “implementational details” which are for whatever reason deemed unimportant for answering a given complexity-theoretic question. For example, Simon’s problem (Simon 1994) is that of determining the period of a given function \(f\) that is periodic under bit-wise modulo-2 addition. Relative to Simon’s problem, we judge the internal complexity of \(f\) to be unimportant, and so abstract away from it by imagining that we have an oracle to evaluate it in a single step. As useful as these conceptual devices are, however, their usefulness has limitations. To take one example, there are oracles relative to which P = NP, as well as oracles relative to which P \(\not =\) NP. This (and many other) questions are not clarified by oracles (see Fortnow 1994).
3.1.2 Deutsch’s Algorithm
Deutsch (1989) asks the following question: Suppose we have a function \(f\) which can be either constant—i.e. such that it produces the same output value for each of its possible inputs, or balanced—i.e. such that the output of one half of its possible inputs is the opposite of the output of the other half. The particular example considered is a function \(f : \{0,1\} \rightarrow \{0,1\}\), which is constant if \(f\)(0) \(= f\)(1) and balanced if \(f\)(0) \(\ne f\)(1). Classically it would take two evaluations of the function to tell whether it is one or the other. Quantum-mechanically, we can answer this question in one evaluation.
A Schematic Representation of Deutsch’s Algorithm
After initially preparing (Mermin 2007, ch. 2) the first and second qubits of the computer in the state \(\lvert 0\rangle\lvert 0\rangle\), one then “flips” both qubits (see the Figure above) using “NOT” gates (i.e. Pauli X transformations) to \(\lvert 1 \rangle\), and then subjects each qubit to a Hadamard gate. One then sends the two qubits through an oracle or ‘black box’ which one imagines as a unitary gate, \(\mathbf{U}_f\), representative of the function whose character (of being either constant or balanced) we wish to determine, where we define \(\mathbf{U}_f\) so that it takes inputs like \(\lvert x,y\rangle\) to \(\lvert x, y\oplus f (x)\rangle\), such that \(\oplus\) is addition modulo two (i.e. exclusive-or). The first qubit is then fed into a further Hadamard gate, and the final output of the algorithm (prior to measurement) is the state:
\[\frac{1}{2}| 1 \rangle(| f(0) \rangle - | \hat{f}(0) \rangle)\]
whenever \(f\) is constant, and the state:
\[\frac{1}{2}| 0 \rangle(| f(0) \rangle - | \hat{f}(0) \rangle)\]
whenever \(f\) is balanced, where \(\hat{f}(x) \equiv 1 \oplus f(x)\). Since the computational basis states are orthogonal to one another, a single measurement of the first qubit suffices to retrieve the answer to our original question regarding the function’s nature. And since there are two possible constant functions and two possible balanced functions from \(f : \{0,1\} \rightarrow \{0,1\}\), we can characterise the algorithm as distinguishing, using only one oracle call, between two quantum disjunctions without finding out the truth values of the disjuncts themselves, i.e. without determining which balanced or which constant function \(f\) is (Bub 2010).
A generalisation of Deutsch’s problem, called the Deutsch-Jozsa problem (Deutsch & Jozsa 1992), enlarges the class of functions under consideration so as to include all of the functions \(f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}\), i.e., rather than only considering \(n = 1\). The best deterministic classical algorithm for determining whether a given such function is constant or balanced requires \(\frac{2^{n}}{2}+1\) queries to an oracle. In a quantum computer, however, we can answer the question using one oracle call. As with Deutsch’s algorithm, an analysis shows that the reason why a quantum computer only requires one call to the oracle to evaluate the global property of the function in question, is that the output state of the computer is a superposition of balanced and constant states such that the balanced states all lie in a subspace of the system’s Hilbert space orthogonal to that of the constant states and can therefore be distinguished from the latter in a single measurement (Bub 2006a).
3.1.3 Simon’s Algorithm
Suppose we have a Boolean function \(f\) on \(n\) bits that is 2-to-1, i.e. that takes \(n\) bits to \(n-1\) bits in such a way that for every \(n\)-bit integer \(x_1\) there is an \(n\)-bit integer \(x_2\) for which \(f (x_{1}) = f (x_{2})\). The function is moreover periodic in the sense that \(f(x_1)\) = \(f(x_2)\) if and only if \(x_1 = x_2 \oplus a\), where \(\oplus\) designates bit-wise modulo 2 addition and \(a\) is an \(n\)-bit nonzero number called the period of \(f\). Simon’s problem is the problem to find \(a\) given \(f\). Relative to an oracle \(U_f\) that evaluates \(f\) in a single step, Simon’s quantum algorithm (Simon 1994) finds the period of \(f\) in a number of oracle calls that grows only linearly with the length of \(n\), while the best known classical algorithm requires an exponentially greater number of oracle calls. Simon’s algorithm reduces to Deutsch’s algorithm when \(n=2\), and can be regarded as an extension of the latter, in the sense that in both cases a global property of a function is evaluated in no more than a (sub-)polynomial number of oracle invocations, owing to the fact that the output state of the computer just before the final measurement is decomposed into orthogonal subspaces, only one of which contains the problem’s solution. Note that one important difference between Deutsch’s and Simon’s algorithms is that the former yields a solution with certainty, whereas the latter only yields a solution with probability very close to 1. For more on the logical analysis of these first quantum circuit-based algorithms see Bub (2006a) and Bub (2010).
3.1.4 Shor’s Algorithm
The algorithms just described, although demonstrating the potential superiority of quantum over classical computation, nevertheless deal with apparently unimportant computational problems. Moreover the speed-ups in each of them are only relative to their respective oracles. It is therefore doubtful whether research into quantum computing would have attracted so much attention in the 1990s had Shor not realised that Simon’s algorithm could be harnessed to solve a much more interesting and crucial problem, namely factoring, which lies at the heart of widely-used cryptographic protocols such as RSA (Rivest, Shamir, & Adleman 1978). Shor’s algorithm turned quantum computing into one of the most exciting research domains in quantum mechanics.
Shor’s algorithm exploits the ingenious number theoretic argument that two prime factors \(p,q\) of a positive integer \(N=pq\) can be found by determining the period, \(r\), of a function \(f(x) = y^x \textrm{mod} N,\) for any \(y < N\) which has no common factors with \(N\) other than 1 (Nielsen & Chuang 2010, app. 4). The period of \(f(x)\) depends on \(y\) and \(N\). If one knows it, one can factor \(N\) if \(r\) is even and if \(y^{\,\frac{r}{2}} \neq -1\) mod \(N\). This will be jointly the case with probability greater than \(\frac{1}{2}\) for any \(y\) chosen randomly (otherwise one chooses another value of \(y\) and tries again). The factors of \(N\) are the greatest common divisors of \(y^{\,\frac{r}{2}} \pm 1\) and \(N\), which can be found in polynomial time using the well known Euclidean algorithm. In other words, Shor’s remarkable result rests on the discovery that the problem of factoring reduces to the problem of finding the period of a certain periodic function. That this problem can be solved efficiently by a quantum computer is hinted at by Simon’s algorithm, which considers the more restricted case of functions periodic under bit-wise modulo-2 addition as opposed to the periodic functions under ordinary addition considered here.
Notwithstanding that factoring is believed to be only in NP and not in NP-complete (see Aaronson 2013a, 64–66), Shor’s result is arguably the most dramatic example of quantum speed-up known. To verify whether \(n\) is prime takes a number of steps which is polynomial in \(\log_{2}n\) (the binary encoding of a natural number \(n\) requires \(\log_{2}n\) resources). But nobody knows how to classically factor numbers into primes in polynomial time, and the best classical algorithms we have for this problem are sub-exponential. A number of widely-used modern cryptographic protocols are based on these facts (Giblin 1993), and the discovery that quantum computers can solve factoring in polynomial time has therefore had a dramatic effect. The implementation of the algorithm on a scalable architecture would consequently have economic, as well as scientific consequences (Alléaume et al. 2014).
3.1.5 Grover’s Algorithm
In a brilliant undercover operation, Agent 13 has managed to secure two crucial bits of information concerning the whereabouts of the arch-villain Siegfried: the phone number of the secret hideout from which he intends to begin carrying out KAOS’s plans for world domination, and the fact that the number is a listed one (apparently an oversight on Siegfried’s part). Unfortunately you and your colleagues at CONTROL have no other information besides this. Can you find Siegfried’s hideout using only this number and a phone directory? In theoretical computer science this task is known as an unstructured search. In the worst case, if there are \(n\) entries in the directory, the computational resources required to find the entry will be linear in \(n\). Grover (1996) showed how this task could be done with a quantum algorithm using computational resources on the order of only \(\sqrt{n}\). Agreed, this speed-up is more modest than Shor’s since unstructured search belongs to the class \(\mathbf{P}\), but contrary to Shor’s case, where the classical complexity of factoring is still unknown, here the superiority of the quantum algorithm, however modest, is definitely provable. That this quadratic speed-up is also the optimal quantum speed-up possible for this problem was proved by Bennett, Bernstein, Brassard, & Vazirani (1997).
Although the purpose of Grover’s algorithm is usually described as “searching a database”, it may be more accurate to describe it as “inverting a function”. Roughly speaking, if we have a function \(y=f(x)\) that can be evaluated on a quantum computer, Grover’s algorithm allows us to calculate \(x\) given \(y\). Inverting a function is related to searching a database because we could come up with a function that produces a particular value of \(y\) if \(x\) matches a desired entry in a database, and another value of \(y\) for other values of \(x\). The applications of Grover’s algorithm are far-reaching (even more so than foiling Siegfried’s plans for world domination). For example, it can be used to determine efficiently the number of solutions to an \(N\)-item search problem, hence to perform exhaustive searches on a class of solutions to an NP-complete problem and substantially reduce the computational resources required for solving it.
3.2 Adiabatic Algorithms
Many decades have passed since the discovery of the first quantum algorithm, but so far little progress has been made with respect to the “Holy Grail” of solving an NP-complete problem with a quantum circuit. In 2000 a group of physicists from MIT and Northeastern University (Farhi et al. 2000 [Other Internet Resources]) proposed a novel paradigm for quantum computing that differs from the circuit model in several interesting ways. Their goal was to try to decide with this algorithm instances of one of the most famous NP-complete problems: satisfiability. According to the adiabatic theorem (see, e.g., Messiah 1961) and given certain specific conditions, a quantum system remains in its lowest energy state, known as the ground state, along an adiabatic transformation in which the system is deformed slowly and smoothly from an initial Hamiltonian to a final Hamiltonian (as an illustration, think of moving a sleeping baby in a cradle from the living room to the bedroom. If the transition is done slowly and smoothly enough, and if the baby is a sound sleeper, then it will remain asleep during the whole transition). The most important condition in this theorem is the energy gap between the ground state and the next excited state (in our analogy, this gap reflects how sound asleep the baby is). Being inversely proportional to the evolution time \(T\), this gap controls the latter. If this gap exists during the entire evolution (i.e., there is no level crossing between the energy states of the system), the theorem dictates that in the adiabatic limit (when \(T\rightarrow \infty)\) the system will remain in its ground state. In practice, of course, \(T\) is always finite, but the longer it is, the less likely it is that the system will deviate from its ground state during the time evolution.
The crux of the quantum adiabatic algorithm which rests on this theorem lies in the possibility of encoding a specific instance of a given decision problem in a certain Hamiltonian (this can be done by capitalising on the well-known fact that any decision problem can be derived from an optimisation problem by incorporating into it a numerical bound as an additional parameter). One then starts the system in a ground state of another Hamiltonian which is easy to construct, and slowly evolves the system in time, deforming it towards the desired Hamiltonian. According to the quantum adiabatic theorem and given the gap condition, the result of such a physical process is another energy ground state that encodes the solution to the desired decision problem. The adiabatic algorithm is thus a rather ‘laid back’ algorithm: one needs only to start the system in its ground state, deform it adiabatically, and measure its final ground state in order to retrieve the desired result. But whether or not this algorithm yields the desired speed-up depends crucially on the behaviour of the energy gap as the number of degrees of freedom in the system increases. If this gap decreases exponentially with the size of the input, then the evolution time of the algorithm will increase exponentially; if the gap decreases polynomially, the decision problem so encoded could be solved efficiently. Physicists have been studying spectral gaps for almost a century, but they have only relatively recently begun to do so with computing in mind. It is now known that there exists no algorithm to determine, given the Hamiltonian of an arbitrary quantum many-body system, whether it is gapped or gapless (Cubitt, Perez-Garcia, & Wolf 2015). In practice, gap amplification techniques are employed in adiabatic quantum computers to ensure the existence of a gap throughout a computation (Albash & Lidar 2018, sec. F).
The quantum adiabatic algorithm holds much promise (Farhi et al. 2001). It has been shown (Aharonov et al. 2008) to be polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (that is, each model can simulate the other with only polynomial overhead in the number of qubits and computational steps), but the caveat that is sometimes left unmentioned is that its application to an intractable computational problem may sometimes require solving another, as intractable a task (this general worry was first raised by a philosopher; see Pitowsky 1990). Indeed, Reichardt (2004) has shown that there are simple problems for which the algorithm will get stuck in a local minimum, in which there are exponentially many eigenvalues all exponentially close to the ground state energy, so applying the adiabatic theorem, even for these simple problems, will take exponential time, and we are back to square one. For a recent survey of the state of the art, see Albash & Lidar (2018).
3.3 Measurement-Based Algorithms
Measurement-based algorithms differ from circuit algorithms in that instead of employing unitary evolution as the basic mechanism for the manipulation of information, these algorithms make essential use of measurements in the course of a computation and not only at the readout stage. They fall into two categories. The first is teleportation quantum computing, based on an idea of Gottesman & Chuang (1999), and developed into a computational model by Nielsen (2003) and Leung (2004). The second is the “one way quantum computer”, known also as the “cluster state” model (Raussendorf & Briegel 2002). The interesting feature of these models, which are polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (Raussendorf, Browne, & Briegel 2003), is that they can efficiently simulate unitary quantum dynamics using non-unitary measurements. This is accomplished (see Duwell 2021, 5.2) via measurements on a pool of highly entangled quantum systems such that the orthonormal basis in which each measurement is performed is calculated, via a classical computer, using the results of earlier measurements.
Measurement-based models are interesting from a foundational perspective for a number of reasons. To begin with, in these models there is a clear separation between the classical (i.e., the calculation of the next measurement-basis) and quantum (i.e., measurements on the entangled qubits) parts of a computation, which may make it easier to pinpoint the quantum resources that are responsible for speed-up. Further, they may offer insight into the role of entanglement in quantum computing. They may also have interesting engineering-related consequences, suggesting a different kind of computer architecture which is more fault tolerant (Brown & Roberts 2020; Nielsen & Dawson 2005).
3.4 Topological-Quantum-Field-Theory (TQFT) Algorithms
Another model for quantum computing which has attracted a lot of attention, especially from Microsoft inc. (Freedman 1998), is the Topological Quantum Field Theory model (Lahtinen & Pachos 2017). In contrast to the easily visualisable circuit model, this model resides in the most abstract reaches of theoretical physics. The exotic physical systems TQFT describes are topological states of matter. That the formalism of TQFT can be applied to computational problems was shown by Witten (1989) and the idea was later developed by others. One of the principal merits of the model, which is polynomially equivalent to the circuit model (Aharonov, Jones, & Landau 2009; Freedman, Kitaev, & Wang 2002), lies in its high tolerance to the errors which are inevitably introduced in the implementation of a large scale quantum computer (see below). Topology is especially helpful here because many global topological properties are, by definition, invariant under deformation, and given that most errors are local, information encoded in topological properties is robust against them.
4 Realisations
The quantum computer might be the theoretician’s dream, but as far as experimentalists are concerned, its full realisation, which involves resolving the still open question of how to combine the elements needed to build a quantum computer into scalable systems (see Van Meter & Horsman 2013), is a nightmare. Shor’s algorithm may break RSA encryption, but it will remain an anecdote if the largest number that it can factor is 21 (Martín-López et al. 2012; Skosana & Tame 2021). In the circuit-based model the problem is to achieve a scalable quantum system that at the same time will allow one to (1) robustly represent quantum information with (2) a time to decoherence significantly longer than the length of the computation, (3) implement a universal family of unitary transformations, (4) prepare a fiducial initial state, and (5) measure the output result (these are DiVincenzo (2000)’s five criteria). Alternative paradigms may trade some of these requirements with others, but the gist will remain the same, i.e., one would have to achieve control of one’s quantum system in such a way that the system will remain “quantum” albeit macroscopic or at least mesoscopic in its dimensions.
In order to deal with these challenges, several ingenious solutions have been devised, including quantum error correction codes and fault tolerant computation (Aharonov & Ben-Or 1997; de Beaudrap & Horsman 2020; Horsman, Fowler, Devitt, & Van Meter 2012; Raussendorf, Harrington, & Goyal 2008; Shor 1995; Shor & DiVincenzo 1996; Steane 1996) which can dramatically reduce the spread of errors during a ‘noisy’ quantum computation. An important criticism of these active error correction schemes, however, is that they are devised for a very unrealistic noise model which treats the computer as quantum and the environment as classical (Alicki, Lidar, & Zinardi 2006). Once a more realistic noise model is allowed, the feasibility of large scale, fault tolerant and computationally superior quantum computers is less clear (Hagar 2009; Tabakin 2017).
In the near term, a promising avenue for realising a quantum advantage in a limited number of problem domains is the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) paradigm (Lau, Lim, Shrotriya, & Kwek 2022; Preskill 2018). The NISQ paradigm does not employ any error correction mechanisms (postponing the problem to implement scalable versions of these to the future) but rather focuses on building computational components, and on tackling computational problems, that are inherently more resilient to noise. These include, for example, certain classes of optimisation problems, quantum semidefinite programming, and digital quantum simulation (Tacchino, Chiesa, Carretta, & Gerace 2020). A caveat here is that as the resiliency to noise of a circuit increases, the more classically it behaves.
As just mentioned, one of the envisioned applications of NISQ computing is for digital quantum simulation (i.e. simulation using a gate-based programmable quantum computer). There is an older tradition of analog quantum simulation, however, wherein one utilises a quantum system whose dynamics resemble the dynamics of a particular target system of interest. Although it is believed that digital quantum simulation will eventually supersede it, the field of analog quantum simulation has progressed substantially in the years since it was first proposed, and analog quantum simulators have already been used to study quantum dynamics in regimes thought to be beyond the reach of classical simulators (see, e.g., Bernien et al. 2017; for further discussion of the philosophical issues involved, see Hangleiter, Carolan, & Thébault 2022).
5 Philosophical Questions
In this section we review some of the important philosophical issues related to quantum computing that have been discussed in the philosophical and physical literature. For more detailed surveys of some of these issues that are still accessible to non-specialists, see Cuffaro (2022) and Duwell (2021).
5.1 What is Quantum in Quantum Computing?
Putting aside the problem of practically realising and implementing a large scale quantum computer, a crucial theoretical question remains open: What physical resources—which of the essential features of quantum mechanics—are responsible for the putative power of quantum computers to outperform classical computers? A number of candidates have been put forward. Fortnow (2003) posits interference as the key, though it has been suggested that this is not truly a quantum phenomenon (Spekkens 2007). Jozsa (1997) and many others point to entanglement, although there are purported counter-examples to this thesis (see, e.g., Linden & Popescu 1998 [Other Internet Resources], Biham, Brassard, Kenigsberg, & Mor 2004, and for a philosophical discussion of their significance see Cuffaro 2017). Howard, Wallman, Veitch, & Emerson (2014) appeal to quantum contextuality. For Bub (2010), the answer lies in the logical structure of quantum mechanics (cf. Dalla Chiara, Giuntini, Leporini, & Sergioli 2018), while Duwell (2018) argues for quantum parallelism. And for Deutsch (1997) and others it is “parallel worlds” which are the resource.
Speculative as it may seem, the question “what is quantum in quantum computing?” has significant practical consequences. It is almost certain that one of the reasons for the paucity of quantum algorithms that have actually been discovered is the lack of a full understanding of what makes a quantum computer quantum. Quantum computing skeptics (Levin 2003) happily capitalise on this: If no one knows why quantum computers are superior to classical ones, how can we be sure that they are, indeed, superior?
5.1.1 The Debate over Parallelism and Many Worlds
The answer that has tended to dominate the popular literature on quantum computing is motivated by evolutions such as:
\[\tag{1} \Sigma_{x} \lvert x\rangle \lvert 0\rangle \rightarrow \Sigma_{x} \lvert x\rangle \lvert f(x)\rangle,\]
which were common to many early quantum algorithms. Note the appearance that \(f\) is evaluated for each of its possible inputs simultaneously. The idea that we should take this at face value—that quantum computers actually do compute a function for many different input values simultaneously—is what Duwell (2018, 2021) calls the Quantum Parallelism Thesis (QPT). For Deutsch, who accepts it as true, the only reasonable explanation for the QPT is that the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is also true. For Deutsch, a quantum computer in superposition, like any other quantum system, exists in some sense in many classical universes simultaneously. These provide the physical arena within which the computer effects its parallel computations. This conclusion is also defended by Hewitt-Horsman (2009) and by Wallace (2012). Wallace notes, however, that the QPT—and hence the explanatory need for many worlds—may not be true of all or even most quantum algorithms.
For Pitowsky (2002) and Steane (2003), the explanation for quantum speedup is not to be found in quantum parallelism. Pitowsky (2002) asks us to consider a given solution, which has been found using a quantum circuit-based algorithm, to a problem like satisfiability. The quantum algorithm may appear to solve this problem by testing exponentially many assignments “at once” as suggested by (1), yet this quantum ‘miracle’ helps us very little since, as previously mentioned, any measurement performed on the output state collapses it, and if there is one possible truth assignment that solves this decision problem, the probability of retrieving it is no greater than it would be for a classical probabilistic Turing machine which guesses the solution and then checks it. Pitowsky’s conclusion is that achieving quantum speedup requires us to construct ‘clever’ superpositions that increase the probability of successfully retrieving the result far more than that of a pure guess (see also Aaronson 2022 [Other Internet Resources]). Steane (2003), among other things, argues that if we compare the information actually produced by quantum and classical algorithms, then we should conclude that quantum algorithms perform not more but fewer, cleverer, computations than classical algorithms (see, also, Section 5.1.2 below). Additionally Steane argues that the motivation for the QPT is at least partly due to misleading aspects of the standard quantum formalism.
Another critic of the MWI approach is Duwell, who (contra Pitowsky and Steane) accepts the QPT (Duwell 2018), but nevertheless denies (contra Deutsch) that it uniquely supports the MWI (Duwell 2007). Considering the phase relations between the terms in a superposition such as (1) is crucially important when evaluating a quantum algorithm’s computational efficiency. Phase relations, however, are global properties of a state. Thus a quantum computation, Duwell argues, does not consist solely of local parallel computations. But in this case, the QPT does not uniquely support the MWI over other explanations.
Defending the MWI, Hewitt-Horsman (2009) argues (contra Steane) that to state that quantum computers do not actually generate each of the evaluation instances represented in (1) is false according to the view: on the MWI such information could be extracted in principle given sufficiently advanced technology. Further, Hewitt-Horsman emphasises that the MWI is not motivated simply by a suggestive mathematical representation. Worlds on the MWI are defined according to their explanatory usefulness, manifested in particular by their stability and independence over the time scales relevant to the computation. Wallace (2012) argues similarly.
Aaronson (2013b) and Cuffaro (2012, 2022) point out that there is a prima facie tension between the Many Worlds Explanation (MWX) of Quantum Computing and the MWI. The latter typically employs decoherence as a criterion for distinguishing macroscopic worlds from one another. Quantum circuit model algorithms, however, utilise coherent superpositions. To distinguish computational worlds from one another, therefore, one needs to somehow modify the decoherence criterion, but Cuffaro questions whether this can be successfully motivated independently of a prior commitment to the MWI. Further, Cuffaro argues that the MWX is for all practical purposes incompatible with measurement based computation, for even granting the legitimacy of a modified world identification criterion, there is no natural way in this model to identify worlds that are stable and independent in the way required.
5.1.2 The Elusive Nature of Speed-Up
Even if we could rule out the MWX, identifying the physical resource(s) responsible for quantum speed-up would remain a difficult problem. Among other things the question raises important issues about how to measure the complexity of a given quantum algorithm, as well as issues about which quantum operations we can realistically expect to be able to implement (Geroch 2009, ch. 18; Schmitz 2023). The answers differ according to the particular model under consideration. In the adiabatic model one needs only to estimate the energy gap behaviour and its relation to the input size (encoded in the number of degrees of freedom of the Hamiltonian of the system). In the measurement-based model one counts the number of measurements needed to reveal the solution that is hidden in the input cluster state (since the preparation of the cluster state is a polynomial process, it does not add to the complexity of the computation). But in the circuit model things are not as straightforward. After all, the whole of the quantum circuit-based computation can be represented as a single unitary transformation from the input state to the output state.
This arguably suggests that the source of the power of a quantum computer, if any, lies not in its dynamics (i.e., the Schrödinger equation) per se, but rather in some feature of the quantum state, or “wave function”. Consider also that the Hilbert subspace “visited” during a quantum computational process is, at any moment, a linear space spanned by all of the vectors in the total Hilbert space which have been created by the computational process up to that moment. But this Hilbert subspace is thus a subspace spanned by a polynomial number of vectors and is thus at most a polynomial subspace of the total Hilbert space. A classical simulation of the quantum evolution on a Hilbert space with polynomial number of dimensions (that is, a Hilbert space spanned by a number of basis vectors which is polynomial in the number of qubits involved in the computation), however, can be carried out in a polynomial number of classical computations. Were quantum dynamics solely responsible for the power of quantum computing, the latter could be mimicked in a polynomial number of steps with a classical computer (see, e.g. Vidal 2003).
This is not to say that quantum computation is no more powerful than classical computation. The key point, of course, is that one does not end a quantum computation with an arbitrary superposition, but aims for a very special, ‘clever’ state—to use Pitowsky’s term. Quantum computations are not always efficiently classically simulable because the characterisation of the computational subspace of certain quantum states is difficult. Consequently, in the quantum circuit model one should count the number of computational steps in the computation not by counting the number of transformations of the state, but by counting the number of one- or two-qubit local transformations that are required to create the ‘clever’ superposition that ensures the desired speed-up. (Note that Shor’s algorithm, for example, involves three major steps in this context: First, one creates the ‘clever’ entangled state with a set of unitary transformations. The result of the computation—a global property of a function—is now ‘hidden’ in this state; second, in order to retrieve this result, one projects it on a subspace of the Hilbert space, and finally one performs another set of unitary transformations in order to make the result measurable in the original computational basis. All these steps count as computational steps as far as the efficiency of the algorithm is concerned. See also Bub 2006b.) The trick is to perform these local one- or two-qubit transformations in polynomial time, and it is likely that it is here where the physical power of quantum computing may be found.
The quantum information revolution has prompted discussion and debate (in which both physicists and philosophers have figured centrally) over what the rising new science can tell us about the foundations of quantum mechanics (see, e.g., Bub 2016; Bub & Pitowsky 2010; Chiribella & Spekkens 2016; Cuffaro 2020; Dunlap 2022; Duwell 2020; Felline 2016; Henderson 2020; Koberinski & Müller 2018; Janas, Cuffaro, & Janssen 2022; Myrvold 2010; Timpson 2013). To be sure (though see below), no resolution to the quantum measurement problem would seem to be forthcoming (see Felline 2020; Hagar 2003; Hagar & Hemmo 2006). But what the rise of the new science has motivated, some would argue, is a reconsideration of whether that is a problem worth solving at all. On “informational approaches” to the interpretation of quantum mechanics such as these (see Cuffaro 2023), quantum mechanics is seen as elevating something that we already know effectively constrains the practice of classical physics (Curiel 2020 [Other Internet Resources]) to the level of a postulate, namely, that interpreting the outcome of a measurement interaction as providing us with information about a given system of interest requires the specification of a schematic representation of an observer, minimally in terms of a “Boolean frame” within which one represents the answers to a set of yes-or-no questions associated with the system. On such a view, classical physics can be understood as a special case of this more general conception of a theory in which such a schematic representation adds no information that is not already contained, in principle, in a given system’s state description. That quantum mechanics is more general than this is the reason why, it is argued, it is able to represent correlational phenomena that cannot be represented efficiently in classical mechanics. And furthermore this ought to make us reconsider the usefulness for physics of the quest for a theory underlying quantum mechanics that satisfies our classical intuitions, such as that a “fundamental” theory of physics must solve the measurement problem.
Not all of the foundational work prompted by the rising science of quantum computing takes this attitude toward the measurement problem, and it is the hope of some that recent advances in the realisation of a large scale quantum computer may actually provide us with an empirical solution to it. As it turns out, collapse theories—one form of alternatives to quantum theory which aim to solve the measurement problem—modify Schrödinger’s equation and give different predictions from quantum theory in certain specific circumstances. These circumstances can be realised, moreover, if decoherence effects can be suppressed (Bassi, Adler, & Ippoliti 2004). Now one of the most difficult obstacles that await the construction of a large scale quantum computer is its robustness against decoherence effects (Unruh 1995). It thus appears that the technological capabilities required for the realisation of a large scale quantum computer are potentially related to those upon which the distinction between “true” and “false” collapse (Pearle 1997), i.e., between collapse theories and environmentally induced decoherence, is contingent. Consequently the physical realisation of a large-scale quantum computer, if it were of the right architecture, could potentially shed light on one of the long standing conceptual problems in the foundations of the theory, and if so this would serve as yet another example of experimental metaphysics (the term was coined by Abner Shimony to designate the chain of events that led from the EPR argument via Bell’s theorem to Aspect’s experiments). Note, however, that as just mentioned, one would need to consider the computer’s architecture before making any metaphysical conclusions. The computer architecture is important because while dynamical collapse theories tend to collapse superpositions involving the positions of macroscopic quantities of mass, they tend not to collapse large complicated superpositions of photon polarisation or spin.
5.3 Quantum Causality
Is quantum mechanics compatible with the principle of causality? This is an old question (Hermann 2017; Schlick 1961, 1962). In the contemporary literature there is considerable skepticism regarding the prospects of explaining quantum phenomena causally (Hausman & Woodward 1999; Woodward 2007), or at any rate locally causally, especially in the wake of Bell’s theorem (Myrvold 2016). Inspired by ideas very familiar to computer scientists, however, a strand in the physical and philosophical literature on causation has begun to reconsider whether the prospects for a locally causal explanation of quantum phenomena, at least in the context of an interventionist theory of causation, are quite as hopeless as they may initially have seemed (Adlam 2023; Allen, Barrett, Horsman, Lee, & Spekkens 2017; Costa & Shrapnel 2016; Lorenz 2022; Shrapnel 2017). This is not to say that decades of physical and philosophical investigations into the consequences of Bell’s theorem have all been mistaken, of course. For one thing, the interventionist frameworks utilised in this new work are operationalist, thus the relevance of this work to so-called hidden variables theories of quantum mechanics is unclear. Second, the interventionist frameworks utilised are not classical, and neither is the kind of causality they explicate. Indeed it is arguably the key insight emerging from this work that the frameworks previously utilised for analysing interventionist causation in the quantum context are inappropriate to that context. In contrast to a classical interventionist framework in which events are thought of as primitive (i.e. as not further analysable), events in these generalised frameworks are characterised as processes with associated inputs and outputs. Specifically, one characterises quantum events using a concept from quantum computation and information theory called a quantum channel. And within this generalised interventionist framework, causal models of quantum phenomena can be given which do not need to posit non-local causal influences, and which satisfy certain other desiderata typically required in a causal model (in particular that such a model respect the causal Markov condition and that it not require ‘fine-tuning’; see Shrapnel 2017).
5.4 (Quantum) Computational Perspectives on Physical Science
Physics is traditionally conceived as a primarily “theoretical” activity, in the sense that it is generally thought to be the goal of physics to tell us, even if only indirectly (Fuchs 2002, pp. 5–6), what the world is like independently of any considerations of purpose. This is not the case with every science. Chemistry, for example, is arguably best thought of as a “practically” oriented discipline concerned with the ways in which systems can be manipulated for particular purposes (Bensaude-Vincent 2009). Even within physics, there are sub-disciplines which are best construed in this way (Ladyman 2018; Myrvold 2011; Wallace 2014), and indeed some have even advocated that physics should be reconceptualised as the science of possible and impossible transformations (Deutsch 2013; Marletto 2022; Marletto et al. 2022).
Elaborating upon ideas which one can glean from Pitowsky’s work (1990, 1996, 2002), Cuffaro (2017, 2018a) argues that quantum computation and information theory (QCIT) are practical sciences in this sense, as opposed to the “theoretical sciences” exemplified by physics under its traditional characterisation; further that recognising this distinction illuminates both areas of activity. On the one hand, practical investigators attempting to isolate and/or quantify the computational resources made available by quantum computers are in danger of conceptual confusion if they are not cognisant of the differences between practical and traditional sciences. On the other hand, one should be wary of the significance of classical computer simulations of quantum mechanical phenomena for the purposes of a foundational analysis of the latter. For example, certain mathematical results can legitimately be thought of as no-go theorems for the purposes of a traditional foundational analysis, and yet are not really relevant for the purpose of characterising the class of efficiently simulable quantum phenomena.
5.5 The Church-Turing Thesis and Deutsch’s Principle
The Church-Turing thesis, which asserts that every function naturally regarded as computable is Turing-computable, is argued by Deutsch to presuppose a physical principle, namely that:
[DP]: Every finitely realisable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means. (Deutsch 1985)
Since no machine operating by finite means can simulate classical physics’ continuity of states and dynamics, Deutsch argues that DP is false in a classical world. He argues that it is true for quantum physics, however, owing to the existence of the universal quantum Turing machine he introduces in the same paper, which thus proves both DP and the Church-Turing thesis it underlies to be sound. This idea—that the Church-Turing thesis requires a physical grounding—is set into historical context by Lupacchini (2018), who traces its roots in the thought of Gödel, Post, and Gandy. It is criticised by Timpson (2013), who views it as methodologically fruitful, but as nevertheless resting on a confusion regarding the meaning of the Church-Turing thesis, which in itself has to do with the notion of an effective method and has nothing, per se, to do with physics (cf. Sprevak 2022).
5.6 (Quantum) Computation and Scientific Explanation
In the general philosophy of science literature on scientific explanation there is a distinction between so-called “how-actually” and “how-possibly” explanation, where the former aims to convey how a particular outcome actually came about, and the latter aims to convey how the occurrence of an event can have been possible. That how-actually explanation actually explains is uncontroversial, but the merit (if any) of how-possibly explanation has been debated. While some view how-possibly explanation as genuinely explanatory, others have argued that how-possibly ‘explanation’ is better thought of as, at best, a merely heuristically useful exercise.
It turns out that the science of quantum computation is able to illuminate this debate. Cuffaro (2015) argues that when one examines the question of the source of quantum speed-up, one sees that to answer this question is to compare algorithmic processes of various kinds, and in so doing to describe the possibility spaces associated with these processes. By doing so one explains how it is possible for one process to outperform its rival. Further, Cuffaro argues that in examples like this, once one has answered the how-possibly question, nothing is actually gained by subsequently asking a how-actually question.
5.7 Are There Computational Kinds?
Finally, another philosophical implication of the realisation of a large scale quantum computer regards the long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind on the autonomy of computational theories of the mind (Fodor 1974). In the shift from strong to weak artificial intelligence, the advocates of this view tried to impose constraints on computer programs before they could qualify as theories of cognitive science (Pylyshyn 1984). These constraints include, for example, the nature of physical realisations of symbols and the relations between abstract symbolic computations and the physical causal processes that execute them. The search for the computational feature of these theories, i.e., for what makes them computational theories of the mind, involved isolating some features of the computer as such. In other words, the advocates of weak AI were looking for computational properties, or kinds, that would be machine independent, at least in the sense that they would not be associated with the physical constitution of the computer, nor with the specific machine model that was being used. These features were thought to be instrumental in debates within cognitive science, e.g., the debates surrounding functionalism (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988).
Note, however, that once the physical Church-Turing thesis is violated, arguably some computational notions cease to be autonomous. In other words, given that quantum computers may be able to efficiently solve classically intractable problems, hence re-describe the abstract space of computational complexity (Bernstein & Vazirani 1997), computational concepts and even computational kinds such as ‘an efficient algorithm’ or ‘the class NP’, arguably become machine-dependent, and recourse to ‘hardware’ becomes inevitable in any analysis thereof (Cuffaro 2018b; Hagar 2007). Advances in quantum computing may thus militate against the functionalist view about the unphysical character of the types and properties that are used in computer science. Consequently, efficient quantum algorithms may serve as counterexamples to a-priori arguments against reductionism (Pitowsky 1996)—although the conceptual challenges to the physicalist version of that view would also seem to be non-trivial (Brown 2023). | |||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 3 | 57 | https://igorpak.wordpress.com/category/awards-2/ | en | Igor Pak's blog | [
"https://science.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ICM2014_CoexHallD_WideShot.jpg",
"https://igorpak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-g6-12x9.png?w=50",
"https://igorpak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-g6-12x9.png?w=50",
"https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Posts about Awards written by igorpak | en | Igor Pak's blog | https://igorpak.wordpress.com/category/awards-2/ | By and large, math journals treat the authors like a pesky annoyance, sort of the way a local electric company treats its customers. As in — yes, serving you is our business, but if you don’t like our customer service where else are you going to go? Not all editors operate that way, absolutely not all referees, but so many it’s an accepted norm. We all know that and all play some role in the system. And we all can do better, because we deserve better.
In fact, many well meaning mathematicians do become journal editors, start new journals, and even join the AMS and other professional societies’ governing bodies which oversee the journals. This helps sometimes, but they quickly burn out or get disillusioned. At the end, this only makes second order improvements while the giant sclerotic system continues its descent from bad to worse.
Like everyone else, I took this as a given. I even made some excuses: evil publishers, the overwhelming growth of submissions, everyone stressed and overworked, papers becoming more technical and harder to referee, etc., etc. For decades I watched many math journals turn from friendly if not particularly warm communal endeavors, to zones of hostility.
Only most recently, it occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be this way. We should have better journals, and we deserve a better treatment (I was really off the mark in my first line of this post). Demanding better journals is neither a fantasy nor a manifesto. In fact, physicists have already figured it all out. This post is largely about how they do it, with some lessons and suggestions.
What we have
If you don’t know what I am talking about, walk to any mathematician you see at a conference. If you have a choice, choose the one who looks bored, staring intensely at their shoes. Ask them for their most frustrating journal publishing story. You may as well sit down — the answer might take awhile. Even if they don’t know you (or maybe especially if they don’t know you), they will just unload a litany of the most horrifying stories that would make you question the sanity of people staying in this profession.
Then ask them why do they persevere and keep submitting and resubmitting their papers given that the arXiv is a perfectly fine way to disseminate their work. You won’t hear a coherent answer, but rather the usual fruit salad of practical matters: something about jobs, CVs, graduate students, grants, Deans, promotions, etc. Nobody will ever mention that their goal is to increase their readership, verify the arguments, improve their presentation style, etc., ostensibly the purpose of mathematical journals.
While my personal experience is a relatively happy one, I do have some scars to show and some stories to tell (see this, that and a bit in that blog posts on publishing struggles). There is no need to rehash them. I also know numerous stories of many people because I have asked them these questions. In fact, every time I publish something like this blog post (about the journals’ hall of shame), I get a host of new horror stories by email, with an understanding that I am not allowed to share them.
The adversarial relationship and countless bad experiences make it is easy to lose sight of the big picture. In many ways we are privileged in mathematics to have relatively few bad and for-profit actors. Money and grant funding matters less. We don’t have extreme urgency to publish. We have some relatively objective ways to evaluate papers (by checking the proofs). One really can work on the Moon, as long as one has a laptop and unlimited internet (and breathable air, I suppose).
We have it good, or at least we did when we started sliding into abyss. Because the alarms are not ringing, the innovation in response has stuttered. We are all just chugging along. Indeed, other than a few new online journals, relatively little has changed in the past two decades.
This is in sharp contrast with physics, which had very few of the advantages that math has (depending on the area). Besieged on all sides, physics community was forced to adapt faster and arguably better in response to changes in the publishing landscape. In fact, the innovations they made are so natural to them, their eyes open wide in disbelief when they hear how we continue to publish math papers.
The following is a story of the Physical Review E (PRE), one of the journals of the American Physical Society (APS). I will start with what I learned about the PRE and APS inner working, their culture, successes and challenges, some of which ring very familiar. Only afterwards I will get back to math publishing, the AMS and how we squandered our advantages.
What’s special about PRE?
I chose to write about the PRE because I published my own paper there and enjoyed the experience. To learn more about the journal, I spoke to a number of people affiliated with PRE in different capacities, from the management to members of the Editorial Board, to frequent authors and reviewers. These interviews were rather extensive and the differences with the math publishing culture are much too vast to summarize in a single blog post. I will only highlight things I personally found remarkable, and a few smaller things that can be easily emulated by math journals.
PRE’s place in the physics journal universe
PRE is one of five similarly named “area journals”: PRA, PRB, etc. More generally, it is one of 18 journals of the APS. Other journals include Physical Review Letters (PRL is APS’s flagship journal which published only very short papers), Physical Review X (PRX is another APS’s leading journal, online only, gold open access, publishes longer articles, extremely selective), Reviews of Modern Physics (APS’s highest cited journal which publishes only survey articles), and a number of more specialized journals.
The APS is roughly similar to the the AMS in its prominence and reach in the US. APS’s main publishing competition include the Institute of Physics (IOP, a UK physics society with 85 titles, roughly similar to the LMS), Nature Portfolio (a division of Springer Nature with 156 titles only a few of them in physics), and to a lesser extent Science by AAAS, various Elsevier, SIAM journals, and some MDPI titles.
Journal structure
The PRE editorial structure is rather complicated. Most of the editorial work is done by an assortment of Associate Editors, some of whom are employed full time by the APS (all of them physics PhD’s), and some are faculty in physics or adjacent fields from around the world, typically full time employed at research universities. Such Associate Editors receive a 2 year renewable contract and sometimes work with the APS for many years. Both professional and part time editors do a lot of work handling papers, rejecting some papers outright, inviting referees, etc.
The leadership of PRE is currently in flux, but until recently included Managing Editor, a full time APS employee responsible for running the journal (such as overseeing the work of associate editors), and a university based Lead Editor overseeing the research direction. The APS is currently reviewing applications for a newly created position of Chief Editor who will presumably replace Managing Editor, and is supposed to oversee the work of the Lead Editor and the rest of the editorial team (see this ad).
There is also an “Editorial Board”, whose name might be confusing to math readers. This is really a board of appeals (more on this later), where people serve a 3 year term without pay, giving occasional advice to associate editors and lending their credibility to the journal. Serving on the Editorial Board is both a service to the community and minor honor.
Submissions
The APS is aware of the role the arXiv plays in the community as the main dissemination venue, with journals as an afterthought. So it encourages submissions consisting of arXiv numbers and subject areas. Note that this makes it different from Nature and Science titles, which forbid arXiv or other online postings both for copyright reasons and so not to spoil future headline worthy press releases.
The submissions to all APS journals are required to be in a house two column style with a tiny font. Тhere are sharp word count limits for the “letters” (short communications) and the “articles”. These are rather annoying to calculate (how do you count formulas? tables?), and the journals’ online software is leaves much to be desired.
Desk rejections
At PRE, about 15-20% of all papers are rejected within days after the initial screening by managing or associate editors, who then assign the remaining papers according to research areas. Some associate editors are reluctant to do this at all, and favor at least one report supplemented by initial judgement. This percentage is a little lower than at the (more selective) PRL where it is reported to be 20-25%. Note that all APS journals pay special attention to the style, so it’s important to make an effort to avoid being rejected by a non-expert just because of that.
Curiously, before 2004, the percentage was even lower at PRL, but the APS did some rather interesting research on the issue. It concluded that such papers consume a lot of resources and rarely survive the review process (see this report). Of course, this percentage is relatively low by math standards — several math journals I know have about 30-50% desk rejections, with another 30-40% after a few quick opinions. On the other hand, at Science, over 83% papers get rejected without an external review.
Review process
Almost all the work is handled by associate editors closest to the area. The APS made a major overhaul of its classification of physics areas in 2016, to bring it to modern age (from the old one which resembles the AMS MSC). Note aside: I have been an advocate for an overhaul of MSC for a while, which I called a “historical anachronism” in this long MO answer (itself written about 14 years ago). At the very least the MSC should upgrade its tree structure (with weird horizontal “see also…” links) to a more appropriate poset structure.
Now, associate editors start with desk rejections. If the paper looks publishable, they send it to referees with the goal of obtaining two reports. The papers tend to be much shorter and more readable by the general scientific audience compared with the average math paper, and good style is emphasized as a goal. The reviewers are given only three weeks to write the report, but that time can be extended upon request (by a few more weeks, not months).
Typically, editors aim to finish the first round in three months, so the paper can be published in under six months. Only few papers lag beyond six months at which point, the editors told me, they get genuinely embarrassed. The reason is often an extreme difficulty in finding referees. Asking 4-8 potential referees is normal, but on rare occasions the numbers can be as high as 10-20.
Acceptance rate
In total, PRE receives about 3,500-4,000 submissions a year, of which about 55-60% get accepted, an astonishingly high percentage when compared to even second tier math journals. The number of submissions has been slowly decreasing in recent years, perhaps reflecting many new publications venues. Some editors/authors mentioned MDPI as new evil force (I called MDPI parasitic rather than predatory in this blog post).
For comparison, PRL is an even bigger operation which handles over twice as many papers. I estimate that PRL accepts roughly 20-25% of submissions, probably the lowest rate of all APS journals. In a more extreme behavior, Nature accepts about 8% submissions to publish about 800 papers, while Science accepts about 6% submissions to publish about 640 papers per year.
It is worth putting number published paper in perspective by comparing them with other journals. PRE and PRL publish about 1,800 and 2,100 papers per year, respectively. Other APS journals publish even more: PRD publishes about 4,000, and PRB close to 5,000 papers a year.
For math journals true acceptance ratios are hard to find and these numbers tend to be meaningless anyway due to self-selection and high cost of waiting for rejection. But numbers of published papers are easily available: Jour. AMS publishes about 25, Mathematika about 50, Proc. LMS about 60, Forum Math. Sigma in the range of 60-120, Bull. LMS in the range of 100-150, Trans. AMS about 250, Adv. Math. about 350, IMRN in the range of 300-500, and Proc. AMS about 450 papers per year. These are boutique numbers compared to the APS editorial machine. In the opposite extreme, MDPI Mathematics recently achieved the output of about 5,000 papers a year (I am sure they are very proud).
Publication
When a paper is accepted at PRE, it is sent to production which APS outsources. There are two quick rounds of approval of LaTeX versions compiled in the house style and proofread by a professional. It then gets published online with a unique identifier, usually within 2-3 weeks from the date of acceptance. Old fashioned volumes and numbers do exist, but of no consequence as they are functions of the publication date. There is zero backlog.
Strictly speaking there is still a print version of the PRE. I was told it is delivered to about 30 libraries worldwide that apparently are unconcerned with deforestation and willing to pay the premium. In truth, nobody really wants to read these paper versions. The volumes are so thick and heavy, it is hard to even lift them up from a library shelf. Not to dwell on this too much, but some graduate students I know are unaware even which building houses our math library at UCLA. It’s hard to blame them, especially after COVID…
Appeals
When a paper is rejected, the authors have the right to appeal the decision. The paper is sent to a member of the Editorial Board closest to the area. The editor reads both the paper and the referee reports, then writes their own report, which they sign and send to the authors. More often than not the decision is confirmed, but reversals do happen.
Since what’s “important” is ultimately subjective, appeals serve an important check on Associate Editors and helps keep peace in the community. Numerically, only about 3-5% of rejected papers are sent for an appeal, about 2-3 papers per Editorial Board member each year.
Embarrassingly for the whole field, I cannot think of a single math journal with an appeals process (except, interestingly, for MDPI Mathematics, which famously has the selectivity of a waste bucket). Even Nature has an appeals process, and nobody ever thinks of them as too friendly.
Note: some math journals do allow resubmissions of previously rejected papers. These papers tend to be major revisions of previous versions and typically go the same editor, defeating the point of the appeal.
Editorial system
The APS has its own online editorial system which handles the submissions, and has an unprecedented level of transparency compared to that of math journals I am familiar with. The authors can see a complete log of dates of communications with (anonymized) referees, the actions of editors, etc. In math, the best you can get is “under review” which brings cold comfort.
The editors work as a team, jointly handling all incoming email and submission/resubmission traffic. Routine tasks like forwarding the revision to the first round referees are handled by first person available, but the editorial decisions (accept/reject, choices of referees), are made by the assigned Associate Editor. If an Associate Editor has a week long backlog or is expecting some inactivity, his queue is immediately redistributed between other editors.
Relations between APS journals
Many PRE papers first arrive to PRL where they are quickly rejected. The editorial system allows editors from one journal see all actions and reports in all other APS journals. If the rejected PRL paper fits the scope of PRE and there are reports suggesting PRE might be suitable, PRE editors try to invite such papers. This speeds up the process and simplifies life to everyone involved.
For longer papers, PRE editors also browse rejections from PRX, etc. From time to time, business oriented managers at the APS raise a possibility of creating a lower tier journal where they would publish many papers rejected from PRA–PRE (translation: “why shouldn’t APS get some of MDPI money?”), but the approach to maintain standards keep winning for now. From what I hear, this might change soon enough…
Note: In principle, several editorial systems by Elsevier and the like, do allow transferring papers between math journals. In practice, I haven’t seen this feature ever used (I could be wrong). Additionally, often there are firewalls which preclude editors in one journal from see reports in the other, making the feature useless.
Survey articles
The APS publishes Reviews of Modern Physics, which is fully dedicated to survey articles. Associate Editors are given a budget to solicit such articles and incentivize the authors by paying them about $1,500 for completion within a year, but only $750 is the project took longer. The articles vary in length and scope, from about 15 to about 70 pages (when converted from APS to the bulky AMS style, these pages numbers would more than double). There are also independent submissions which very rarely get accepted as the journal aims to maintain its reputation and relevance. Among all APS publications, this journal is best cited by a wide margin.
We note that there are very few math journals dedicated to surveys, despite a substantial need for expository work. Besides Proc. ICM and Séminaire Bourbaki series which are by invitation only, we single out the Bull. AMS, EMS Surveys and Russian Math Surveys (in Russian, but translated by IOP). Despite Rota’s claim “You are more likely to be remembered by your expository work“, publishing surveys remains difficult unless you opt for a special issue or a conference proceedings. In the last two years I wrote two rather long surveys — on combinatorial interpretations and on linear extensions. Word of advice: if you want to have an easy academic life I don’t recommend doing that — they just eat up your time.
At PRE, there are no surveys, but the editors occasionally solicit “perspectives”. These are forward looking articles suggesting important questions and directions (more like public NSF grant applications than surveys). They publish about five such articles a years, hoping to bring the number up to about ten in the future.
Profiled articles
In 2014, following the approach of popular magazines, PRE started making “Editors’ Suggestions”. These are a small number of articles the editors chose to highlight, both formally and on the website. They are viewed as minor research award that can be listed on CVs by the authors.
Outstanding referee award
The APS instituted this award in 2008, to encourage quick and thorough refereeing. This is a lifetime award and comes with a diploma size plaque which can be hang on the wall. More importantly, it can be submitted to your Department Chair and your friendly Dean as a community validation of your otherwise anonymous efforts.
Each year, there are a total of about 150 awardees selected across all APS journals (out of tens of thousands referees), of which about 10 are from PRE. This selection is taken very seriously. The nominations are done by Associate Editors and then discussed at the editorial meetings. For further details, see this 2009 article about the award by the former Editor-in-Chief of Physical Reviews, which ends with
We feel that the award program has been most successful, and we will be continuing it at APS. [Gene D. Sprouse, Recognizing referees at the American Physical Society]
Note that such distinguished referee awards are not limited to APS or even physics. It’s a simple idea which occurred to journals across “practical” disciplines: accounting, finance, economic geography, economics, public management, regional science, etc., but also e.g. in atmospheric chemistry and philosophy. Why wouldn’t a single math journal have such an award?? Count be flabbergasted.
Community relations
As we mentioned above, in much of physics, the arXiv is a preferred publication venue since the field tends to develop at rapid pace, so strictly speaking the journal publications are not necessary. In some areas, a publication in Nature or Science is key to success, especially for a junior researcher, so the authors are often willing to endure various associated indignities (including no arXiv postings) and if successful pay for the privilege. However, in many theoretical and non-headline worthy areas, these journals are not an option, which is where PRL, PRE and other APS journals come in.
In a way, PRE operates as a digital local newspaper which provides service to the community in the friendliest way possible. It validates the significance of papers needed for job related purposes, helps the authors to improve the style, does not bite newcomers, and does not second guess their experimental finding (there are other venues which do that). It provides a quick turn around and rarely rejects even moderately good papers.
When I asked both the editors and the authors how they feel about PRE, I heard a lot of warmth, the type of feeling I have not heard from anyone towards math journals. There is a feeling of community when the editors tell me that they often publish their own papers at PRE, when the authors want to become editors, etc. In contrast, I heard a lot of vitriol towards Nature and Science, and an outright disdain towards MDPI physics journals.
It could be that my sample size was too small and heavily biased. Indeed, when I polled the authors of MDPI Mathematics (a flagship MDPI journal), most authors expressed high level of satisfaction with the journal, that they would consider submitting there again. One of my heroes, Ravi P. Agarwal who I profiled in this blog post, published an astounding 37 papers in that journal, which clearly found its target audience (so much that it stopped spamming people, or maybe it’s just me).
Note aside: Personally, the only journal I actually cared about was the storied JCTA where my senior colleague Bruce Rothschild was the Editor in Chief for 25 years, and where I would publish my best combinatorics papers. In 2020, the editorial board resigned in mass and formed Combin. Theory. I am afraid, my feelings have not transferred to CT, nor have they stayed with JCTA which continues to publish. They just evaporated.
Money matters
Despite a small army of professional editors, the APS journals provide a healthy albeit slowly decreasing revenue stream (about $43 mil. in 2022, combined from all journals, see 2022 tax disclosures on ProPublica website). The journals are turning a profit for the APS (spent on managers and various APS activities) despite all the expenses. They are spending more and making more money than the AMS (compare with their 2022 tax disclosures on ProPublica). There is much more to say here, but this post is already super long and the fun part is only starting.
Back to math journals
In the 20th century world with its print publishing, having a local peer review print journals made sense. A university of a group of universities would join forces with a local publisher and starts the presses. That’s where local faculty would publish their own papers, that’s where they would publish conference proceeding, etc. How else do you explain Duke Mathematical Journal, Israel Journal of Mathematics, Moscow Mathematical Journal, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, and Siberian Journal of Mathematics? I made a lot of fun at the geographical titles in this blog post, and I maintain that they sound completely outdated (I published in all five of these, naturally).
Now, in the 21st century, do we really need math journals? This may sound like a ridiculous question, with two standard replies:
We need peer review, i.e. some entity must provide a certificate that someone anonymous read the paper and takes responsibility for its validity (sound weak isn’t it?).
We need formal validation, i.e. we need to have something to write on our CVs. Different journals have different levels of prestige associated with them leading to distinctions in research recognition (and thus jobs, promotions, grants, etc.)
Fair enough, but are you sure that the journals as we have them are the best vehicles for either of these goals? Does anyone really believes that random online journals do a serious peer review? Where is this idea coming from, that the journals with its obvious biases should be conferring importance of the paper?
How are we supposed to use journals to evaluate the candidates, if these journals have uncertain rankings and in fact the relative rankings of two journals can vary depending on the area? Shouldn’t we separate the peer review aspect which makes multiple submission costly and unethical, from the evaluation aspects which desperately needs competition between the journals?
Again, this all sounds ridiculous if you don’t step back and look objectively at our publishing mess where a math paper can languish in journals for over a year, after which it is returned without a single referee report just because someone decided that at the end the paper is not good enough to be refereed. This happened to me multiple times, and to so many other people I lost count (in one instance, this happened after 3 years of waiting!)
Publishing utopia
Now, I know a lot of people whose dream publishing universe is a lot of run-by-mathematicians not for profit small online publications. It’s great to rid of Elsevier and their ilk, but it would not solve the issues above. In fact, this would bring a lot of anarchy and further loss of standards.
From my perspective, in a perfect world, “the people” (or at least the AMS), would create one mega journal, where the arXiv papers could be forwarded by the authors if they wish. Hundreds of editors (some full time, some part time) divided into arXiv subject areas, would make the initial screening, and keep say 30-40% of them to be send for review. Based on my reading of the arXiv stats, that gives about 10-15K papers a year to be refereed, a number way below what APS handles. The mega journal would only check validity and “publish” only based on correctness.
Publication at the mega journal would already be a distinction albeit a minor one. To ensure some competition, we would probably need to break this mega journal into several (say, 3-5) independently run baby megas, so the authors have a choice where to submit. In the utopia I am imagining, the level of rigor would be the same across all baby megas. It would also be a way to handle MDPI journals which would be left with a reject pile.
This wouldn’t take anything away from the top journals (think Annals) who would not want to outsource their peer review. In fact, I heard of major Annals papers studied by six (!) independent teams of referees, that’s above and beyond. But I also heard of Annals papers which seem to had no technical check at all (like this one by this guy), so the quality is maybe inconsistent.
So what about distinctions? The remnants of the existing general journals would be free from peer review. They would place bids on the best papers attracting them “modulo publication in the mega journal” with some clear set deadlines. The authors would accept the best bid, like graduate admissions, and the paper will be linked to the journal website in the “arXiv overlay” style.
Alternatively, some specialized or non-exclusive journals will make their own selections for best papers in their areas, which could be viewed as awards. One paper could get multiple such awards, and “best journal where the paper could be accepted” optimization issue would disappear completely. This would make a better, more fair world. At the very least, such awards would remove the pressure to publish in the top journals if you have a strong result.
Even better, one can imagine a competitive conference system in the style of CS theory conferences (but also in some areas of Discrete Math) emerging in this scenario. The conference submission could require a prior arXiv posting and later keep track of “verified” papers (accepted to the mega journal). When disentangled from the peer review, these conference could lead to more progress on emerging tools and ideas, and to even the playing field for researchers from small and underfunded universities across the world.
Note that there are already some awards for math papers given by third parties, but only a handful. Notably, AIM has this unusual award. More recently, a new Frontiers of Science Award was introduced for “best recent papers” (nice cash prize for a paper already published in the Annals and the like). Of course, most CS theory conferences have been giving them for decades (the papers later get published by the journals).
Would it work? Wouldn’t the mega journal be just another utility company with terrible service? Well, I don’t know and we will probably never get to find out. That’s why I called it a utopia, not a serious proposal. But it can hardly get any worse. I think pure math and CS theory are unique in requiring true correctness. When correctness is disentangled from evaluating novelty and importance, the point of the mega journal would be to help the authors get their proofs right and the papers accepted. Until then, journal editors (and referees to a smaller degree) have a conflict of interest — helping the authors might mean hurting the journal and vice versa. Guess who usually gets hurt at the end?
Back to reality
Obviously, I have no hopes that the “mega journal” would ever come to life. But NOT because it’s technically impossible or financially unsound. In other fields, communities manage somehow. The APS is a workable approximation of that egalitarian idea. Recently, eLife made another major experiment in publishing — we’ll see how that works out.
But in a professional society such as the AMS where new leadership handpicks two candidates for future leadership in a stale election? With a declining membership? Which claims the Fellow of the AMS award as it biggest achievement? Oh, please! Really, the best we can hope for is for a large “lower tier” journals with a high acceptance ratio. Why would AMS want that? I am glad you asked:
Case for higher acceptance rates at AMS journals
One argument why so few papers get published in good (think top 100) math journals is that math papers can be much longer than typical physics papers, so they take more print space and take longer to referee. However, this argument does not translate well into the digital age. Nor does that apply to Bull. LMS or Proc. AMS, of course, which publish mostly short papers. We mention in passing that while greater length is unavoidable sometimes, mathematicians tend to forget that brevity is a feature, not a bug.
Of course, math editors’ main argument in favor of low acceptance ratios is that this allows one to maintain high quality of papers. While true on its face, when applied uniformly this approach has major negative implications to the community.
Think of college acceptance rates. It’s true that Harvard maintains its prestige by having a ridiculously low acceptance ratio, and being private it’s hard to blame it (not that I am fan of the choices they make either, but this post is about something else). But should major public universities like UCLA do the same? What about community colleges? You see what I mean.
There is an obvious public good in AMS maintaining a large, free, friendly but thorough publication venue for papers that don’t meet the Trans. AMS threshold. This might not be the “mega journal” utopia, but it would be a major step forward. If SIAM, EMS, LMS and other major math societies set up something similar, we would actually be in a good place as the middle tier small journals would start changing their publishing model in response.
Short list of minor suggestions
As you can probably tell by now, in my opinion most math publishers are behind the curve in innovation and community relations. Let me summarize some basic ideas based on the discussion above that seem more approachable:
Stop wasting paper and fully move to electronic publishing.
Do not limit numbers of papers or pages. Rather, aim for as many good papers as you can.
Improve your electronic editorial system to make it more transparent.
Help editors work as a team, and incentivize them financially. Pay for 20% employment to experts across the world to help you run the journal.
Set up new math journals fully dedicated to survey articles, both solicited and contributed.
Create an appeals procedure and add a new type of senior editors who would take the job seriously.
Institute a number of awards: for best long, short and survey articles in your journal, and for best referees. Make an effort to be fair by taking input from all editors.
Journal studies
If you read up to this point, you are probably wondering why most of these simple ideas hadn’t been widely discussed. Clearly, somebody is asleep at the wheel. Or, perhaps, doesn’t want to rock the boat (I am mixing my metaphors here, sorry). In case of for profit publishers like Springer and Elsevier, I can see why — they know all this stuff from their journals in other areas, but are very busy counting the money.
But the AMS Council can sure use a “Chair of journal innovation” whose job would be to conduct journal studies (like the many APS studies I mentioned above), or at least read other publishers’ studies. An amateur like me shouldn’t be able to tell you anything new that you couldn’t learn by googling. Perhaps, start by subscribing to an excellent newsletter Journalology fully dedicated to these ideas.
Acknowledgements.
I am extremely grateful to editors Dirk Jan Bukman, Alexander Kusenko, Valerio Lucarini, Mason Porter and Uwe Täuber, for kindly agreeing to be interviewed on the subject and for being so generous with their time. I am also thankful to several frequent APS contributors who wished to remain anonymous. If I misstated or misunderstood anything, the fault is all mine, obviously.
P.S. Mark Wilson kindly invited me to write a column for the AMS Notices on the issue of publishing. This prompted me to spend many hours thinking about the subject and talking to many physicists. At the end, I submitted a very short and non-polemical version of this blog post. If it ever gets accepted and published I will link it here.
Unity here, unity there, unity shmunity is everywhere. You just can’t avoid hearing about it. Every day, no matter the subject, somebody is going to call for it. Be it in Ukraine or Canada, Taiwan or Haiti, everyone is calling for unity. President Biden in his Inaugural Address called for it eight times by my count. So did former President Bush on every recent societal issue: here, there, everywhere. So did Obama and Reagan. I am sure just about every major US politician made the same call at some point. And why not? Like the “world peace“, the unity is assumed to be a universal good, or at least an inspirational if quickly forgettable goal.
Take the Beijing Olympic Games, which proudly claims that their motto “demonstrates unity and a collective effort” towards “the goal of pursuing world unity, peace and progress”. Come again? While The New York Times isn’t buying the whole “world unity” thing and calls the games “divisive” it still thinks that “Opening Ceremony [is] in Search of Unity.” Vox is also going there, claiming that the ceremony “emphasized peace, world unity, and the people around the world who have battled the pandemic.” So it sounds to me that despite all the politics, both Vox and the Times think that this mythical unity is something valuable, right? Well, ok, good to know…
Closer to home, you see the same themes said about the International Congress of Mathematicians to be held in St. Petersburg later this year. Here is Arkady Dvorkovich, co-chair of the Executive Organizing Committee and former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia: “It seems to us that Russia will be able to truly unite mathematicians from all over the world“. Huh? Are you sure? Unite in what exactly? Because even many Russian mathematicians are not on board with having the ICM in St. Petersburg. And among those from “all over the world”, quite a few are very openly boycotting the congress, so much that even the IMU started to worry. Doesn’t “unity” mean “for all”, as in ∀?
Unity of mathematics
Frequent readers of this blog can probably guess where I stand on the “unity”. Even in my own area of Combinatorics, I couldn’t find much of it at all. I openly mocked “the feeling of unity of mathematics” argument in favor of some conjectures. I tried but could never understand Noga Alon’s claim that “mathematics should be considered as one unit” other than a political statement by a former PC Chair of the 2006 ICM.
So, about this “unity of mathematics”. Like, really? All of mathematics? Quick, tell me what exactly do the Stochastic PDEs, Algebraic Number Theory, Enumerative Combinatorics and Biostatistics have in common? Anything comes to mind? Anything at all? Ugh. Let’s make another experiment. Say, I tell you that only two of these four areas have Fields medals. Can you guess which ones? Oh, you can? Really, it was that easy?? Doesn’t this cut against all of this alleged “unity”?
Anyway, let’s be serious. Mathematics is not a unit. It’s not even a “patterned tapestry” of connected threads. It’s a human endeavor. It’s an assorted collection of scientific pursuits unconstrained by physical experiments. Some of them are deep, some shallow, some are connected to others, and some are motivated by real world applications. You check the MSC 2020 classification, and there is everything under the sun, 224 pages in total. It’s preposterous to look for and expect to find some unity there. There is none to be found.
Let me put it differently. Take poetry. Like math, it’s a artistic endeavor. Poems are written by the people and for the people. To enjoy. To recall when in need or when in a mood. Like math papers. Now, can anyone keep a straight face and say “unity of poetry“? Of course not. If anything, it’s the opposite. In poetry, having a distinctive voice is celebrated. Diverse styles are lauded. New forms are created. Strong emotions are evoked. That’s the point. Why would math be any different then?
What exactly unites us?
Mathematicians, I mean. Not much, I suppose, to the contrary of math politicians’ claims:
I like to think that increasing breadth in research will help the mathematical sciences to recognize our essential unity. (Margaret Wright, SIAM President, 1996)
Huh? Isn’t this like saying that space exploration will help foster cross-cultural understanding? Sounds reasonable until you actually think about what is being said…
Even the style of doing research is completely different. Some prove theorems, some make heavy computer computations, some make physical experiments, etc. At the end, some write papers and put them on the arXiv, some write long books full of words (e.g. mathematical historians), some submit to competitive conferences (e.g. in theoretical computer science), some upload software packages and experimental evidence to some data depositary. It’s all different. Don’t be alarmed, this is normal.
In truth, very little unites us. Some mathematicians work at large state universities, others at small private liberal arts colleges with a completely different approach to teaching. Some have a great commitment to math education, some spend every waking hour doing research, while others enjoy frequent fishing trips thanks to tenure. Some go into university administration or math politics, while others become journal editors.
In truth, only two things unites us — giant math societies like the AMS and giant conferences like ICMs and joint AMS/MAA/SIAM meetings. Let’s treat them separately, but before we go there, let’s take a detour just to see what an honest unrestricted public discourse sounds like:
What to do about the Olympics
The answer depends on who you ask, obviously. And opinions are abound. I personally don’t care other than the unfortunate fact that 2028 Olympics will be hosted on my campus. But we in math should learn how to be critical, so here is a range of voices that I googled. Do with them as you please.
Some are sort of in favor:
I still believe the Olympics contribute a net benefit to humanity. (Beth Daley, The Conversation, Feb. 2018)
Some are positive if a little ambivalent:
The Games aren’t dead. Not by a longshot. But it’s worth noting that the reason they are alive has strikingly little to do with games, athletes or medals. (L. Jon Wertheim, Time, June 2021)
Some like The New York Times are highly critical, calling it “absurdity”. Some are blunt:
More and more, the international spectacle has become synonymous with overspending, corruption, and autocratic regimes. (Yasmeen Serhan, The Atlantic, Aug. 2021)
yet unwilling to make the leap and call it quits. Others are less shy:
You can’t reform the Olympics. The Olympics are showing us what they are, and what they’ve always been. (Gia Lappe and Jonny Coleman, Jacobin, July 2021)
and
Boil down all the sanctimonious drivel about how edifying the games are, and you’re left with the unavoidable truth: The Olympics wreck lives. (Natalie Shure, The New Republic, July 2021)
What is the ICM
Well, it’s a giant collective effort. A very old tradition. Medals are distributed. Lots of talks. Speakers are told that it’s an honor to be chosen. Universities issue press releases. Yes, like this one. Rich countries set up and give away travel grants. Poor countries scramble to pay for participants. The host country gets dubious PR benefits. A week after it’s over everyone forgets it ever happened. Life goes on.
I went to just one ICM, in Rio in 2018. It was an honor to be invited. But the experience was decidedly mixed. The speakers were terrific mathematicians, all of them. Many were good speakers. A few were dreadful in both content and style. Some figured they are giving talks in their research seminar rather than to a general audience, so I left a couple of such talks in middle. Many talks in parallel sections were not even recorded. What a shame!
The crowds were stupefying. I saw a lot of faces. Some were friendly, of people I hadn’t seen in years, sometimes 20 years. Some were people I knew only by name. It was nice to say hello, to shake their hand. But there were thousands more. Literally. An ocean of people. I was drowning. This was the worst place for an introvert.
While there, I asked a lot of people how did they like the ICM. Some were electrified by the experience and had a decent enough time. Some looked like fish out of the water — when asked they just stared at me incomprehensively silently saying “What are you, an idiot?” Some told me they just went to the opening ceremony and left for the beach for the rest of the ICM. Assaf Naor said that he loved everything. I was so amused by that, I asked if I could quote him. “Yes,” he said, “you can quote me: I loved absolutely every bit of the ICM”. Here we go — not everyone is an introvert.
Whatever happened at the ICM
Unlike the Olympics, math people tend to be shy in their ICM criticism. In his somewhat unfortunately titled but otherwise useful historical book “Mathematicians of the World, Unite!” the author, Guillermo Curbera, largely stays exuberant about the subject. He does mention some critical stories, like this one:
Charlotte Angas Scott reported bluntly on the presentation of papers in the congress, which in her opinion were “usually shockingly bad” since “instead of speaking to the audience, [the lecturer] reads his paper to himself in a monotone that is sometimes hurried, sometimes hesitating, and frequently bored . . . so that he is often tedious and incomprehensible.” (Paris 1900 Chapter, p. 24)
Curbera does mention in passing that the were some controversies: Grothendieck refused to attend ICM Moscow in 1966 for political reasons, Margulis and Novikov were not allowed by the Soviet Union to leave the country to receive their Fields medals. Well, nobody’s perfect, right?
Most reports I found on the web are highly positive. Read, for example, Gil Kalai’s blog posts on the ICM 2018. Everything was great, right? Even Doron Zeilberger, not known for holding his tongue, is mostly positive (about the ICM Beijing in 2002). He does suggest that the invited speakers “should go to a ‘training camp‘” for some sort of teacher training re-education, apparently not seeing the irony, or simply under impression of all those great things in Beijing.
The only (highly controversial) criticism that I found was from Ulf Persson who starts with:
The congresses are by now considered to be monstrous affairs very different from the original intimate gatherings where group pictures could be taken.
He then continues to talk about various personal inconveniences, his misimpressions about the ICM setting, the culture, the city, etc., all in a somewhat insensitive and rather disparaging manner. Apparently, this criticism and misimpressions earned a major smackdown from Marcelo Viana, the ICM 2018 Organizing Committee Chair, who wrote that this was a “piece of bigotry” by somebody who is “poorly informed”. Fair enough. I agree with that and with the EMS President Volker Mehrmann who wrote in the same EMS newsletter that the article was “very counterproductive”. Sure. But an oversized 4 page reaction to an opinion article in a math newsletter from another continent seem indicative that the big boss hates criticism. Because we need all that “unity”, right?
Anyway, don’t hold your breath to see anything critical about the ICM St. Petersburg later this year. Clearly, everything is going to be just fantastic, nothing controversial about it. Right…
What to do about the ICM
Stop having them in the current form. It’s the 21st century, and we are starting the third year of the pandemic. All talks can be moved online so that everyone can watch them either as they happen, or later on YouTube. Let me note that I’ve sat in the bleachers of these makeshift 1000+ people convention center auditoriums where the LaTeX formulas are barely visible. This is what the view is like:
Note that the ICM is not like a sports event — there is literally nothing at stake. Also, there are usually no questions afterwards anyway. You are all better off watching the talks later on your laptop, perhaps even on a x1.5 speed. To get the idea, imagine watching this talk in a huge room full of people…. Even better, we can also spread out these online lectures across the time zones so that people from different countries can participate. Something like this World Relay in Combinatorics.
Really, all that CO2 burned to get humans halfway across the world to seat in a crowded space is not doing anyone any good. If the Nobel Prizes can be awarded remotely, so can the Fields medals. Tourism value aside, the amount of meaningful person-to-person interaction is so minimal in a large crowd, I am struggling to find a single good reason at all to have these extravaganzas in-person.
What to do about the AMS
I am not a member of any math societies so it’s not my place to tell them what to do. As a frequent contributor to AMS journals and a former editor of one of them, I did call on the AMS to separate its society business form the publishing, but given that their business model hinges on the books and journals they sell, this is unlikely. Still, let me make some quick observations which might be helpful.
The AMS is clearly getting less and less popular. I couldn’t find the exact membership numbers, but their “dues and outreach” earnings have been flat for a while. Things are clearly not going in the right direction, so much that the current AMS President Ruth Charney sent out a survey earlier this week asking people like me why do we not want to join.
People seem to realize that they have many different views on all thing math related and are seeking associations which are a better fit. One notable example is the Just Mathematics Collective which has several notable boycott initiatives. Another is the Association for Mathematical Research formed following various controversies. Note that there is a great deal of disagreements between these two, see e.g. here, there and there.
I feel these are very good developments. It’s healthy to express disagreements on issues you consider important. And while I disagree with other things in the article below, I do agree with this basic premise:
Totalitarian countries have unity. Democratic republics have disagreement. (Kevin Williamson, Against Unity, National Review, Jan. 2021)
So everyone just chill. Enjoy diverse views and opinions. Disagree with the others. And think twice before you call for “unity” of anything, or praise the ephemeral “unity of mathematics”. There is none.
Conjectures are a staple of mathematics. They are everywhere, permeating every area, subarea and subsubarea. They are diverse enough to avoid a single general adjective. They come in al shapes and sizes. Some of them are famous, classical, general, important, inspirational, far-reaching, audacious, exiting or popular, while others are speculative, narrow, technical, imprecise, far-fetched, misleading or recreational. That’s a lot of beliefs about unproven claims, yet we persist in dispensing them, inadvertently revealing our experience, intuition and biases.
The conjectures also vary in attitude. Like a finish line ribbon they all appear equally vulnerable to an outsider, but in fact differ widely from race to race. Some are eminently reachable, the only question being who will get there first (think 100 meter dash). Others are barely on the horizon, requiring both great effort, variety of tools, and an extended time commitment (think ironman triathlon). The most celebrated third type are like those Sci-Fi space expeditions in requiring hundreds of years multigenerational commitments, often losing contact with civilization it left behind. And we can’t forget the romantic fourth type — like the North Star, no one actually wants to reach them, as they are largely used for navigation, to find a direction in unchartered waters.
Now, conjectures famously provide a foundation of the scientific method, but that’s not at all how we actually think of them in mathematics. I argued back in this pointed blog post that citations are the most crucial for the day to day math development, so one should take utmost care in making references. While this claim is largely uncontroversial and serves as a raison d’être for most GoogleScholar profiles, conjectures provide a convenient idealistic way out. Thus, it’s much more noble and virtuous to say “I dedicated my life to the study of the XYZ Conjecture” (even if they never publish anything), than “I am working hard writing so many papers to gain respect of my peers, get a promotion, and provide for my family“. Right. Obviously…
But given this apparent (true or perceived) importance of conjectures, are you sure you are using them right? What if some/many of these conjectures are actually wrong, what then? Should you be flying that starship if there is no there there? An idealist would argue something like “it’s a journey, not a destination“, but I strongly disagree. Getting closer to the truth is actually kind of important, both as a public policy and on an individual level. It is thus pretty important to get it right where we are going.
What are conjectures in mathematics?
That’s a stupid question, right? Conjectures are mathematical claims whose validity we are trying to ascertain. Is that all? Well, yes, if you don’t care if anyone will actually work on the conjecture. In other words, something about the conjecture needs to interesting and inspiring.
What makes a conjecture interesting?
This is a hard question to answer because it is as much psychological as it is mathematical. A typical answer would be “oh, because it’s old/famous/beautiful/etc.” Uhm, ok, but let’s try to be a little more formal.
One typically argues “oh, that’s because this conjecture would imply [a list of interesting claims and known results]”. Well, ok, but this is self-referential. We already know all those “known results”, so no need to prove them again. And these “claims” are simply other conjectures, so this is really an argument of the type “this conjecture would imply that conjecture”, so not universally convincing. One can argue: “look, this conjecture has so many interesting consequences”. But this is both subjective and unintuitive. Shouldn’t having so many interesting conjectural consequences suggest that perhaps the conjecture is too strong and likely false? And if the conjecture is likely to be false, shouldn’t this make it uninteresting?
Also, wouldn’t it be interesting if you disprove a conjecture everyone believes to be true? In some sense, wouldn’t it be even more interesting if until now everyone one was simply wrong?
None of this are new ideas, of course. For example, faced with the need to justify the “great” BC conjecture, or rather 123 pages of survey on the subject (which is quite interesting and doesn’t really need to be justified), the authors suddenly turned reflective. Mindful of self-referential approach which they quickly discard, they chose a different tactic:
We believe that the interest of a conjecture lies in the feeling of unity of mathematics that it entails. [M.P. Gomez Aparicio, P. Julg and A. Valette, “The Baum-Connes conjecture“, 2019]
Huh? Shouldn’t math be about absolute truths, not feelings? Also, in my previous blog post, I mentioned Noga Alon‘s quote that Mathematics is already “one unit“. If it is, why does it need a new “feeling of unity“? Or is that like one of those new age ideas which stop being true if you don’t reinforce them at every occasion?
If you are confused at this point, welcome to the club! There is no objective way to argue what makes certain conjectures interesting. It’s all in our imagination. Nikolay Konstantinov once told me that “mathematics is a boring subject because every statement is equivalent to saying that some set is empty.” He meant to be provocative rather than uninspiring. But the problem he is underlying is quite serious.
What makes us believe a conjecture is true?
We already established that in order to argue that a conjecture is interesting we need to argue it’s also true, or at least we want to believe it to be true to have all those consequences. Note, however, that we argue that a conjecture is true in exactly the same way we argue it’s interesting: by showing that it holds is some special cases, and that it would imply other conjectures which are believed to be true because they are also checked in various special cases. So in essence, this gives “true = interesting” in most cases. Right?
This is where it gets complicated. Say, you are working on the “abc conjecture” which may or may not be open. You claim that it has many consequences, which makes it both likely true and interesting. One of them is the negative solution to the Erdős–Ulam problem about existence of a dense set in the plane with rational pairwise distances. But a positive solution to the E-U problem implies the Harborth’s conjecture (aka the “integral Fáry problem“) that every graph can be drawn in the plane with rational edge lengths. So, counterintuitively, if you follow the logic above shouldn’t you be working on a positive solution to Erdős–Ulam since it would both imply one conjecture and give a counterexample to another? For the record, I wouldn’t do that, just making a polemical point.
I am really hoping you see where I am going. Since there is no objective way to tell if a conjecture is true or not, and what exactly is so interesting about it, shouldn’t we discard our biases and also work towards disproving the conjecture just as hard as trying to prove it?
What do people say?
It’s worth starting with a general (if slightly poetic) modern description:
In mathematics, [..] great conjectures [are] sharply formulated statements that are most likely true but for which no conclusive proof has yet been found. These conjectures have deep roots and wide ramifications. The search for their solution guides a large part of mathematics. Eternal fame awaits those who conquer them first. Remarkably, mathematics has elevated the formulation of a conjecture into high art. [..] A well-chosen but unproven statement can make its author world-famous, sometimes even more so than the person providing the ultimate proof. [Robbert Dijkgraaf, The Subtle Art of the Mathematical Conjecture, 2019]
Karl Popper thought that conjectures are foundational to science, even if somewhat idealized the efforts to disprove them:
[Great scientists] are men of bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures. [Karl Popper, Heroic Science, 1974]
Here is how he reconciled somewhat the apparent contradiction:
On the pre-scientific level we hate the very idea that we may be mistaken. So we cling dogmatically to our conjectures, as long as possible. On the scientific level, we systematically search for our mistakes. [Karl Popper, quoted by Bryan Magee, 1971]
Paul Erdős was, of course, a champion of conjectures and open problems. He joked that the purpose of life is “proof and conjecture” and this theme is repeatedly echoed when people write about him. It is hard to overestimate his output, which included hundreds of talks titled “My favorite problems“. He wrote over 180 papers with collections of conjectures and open problems (nicely assembled by Zbl. Math.)
Peter Sarnak has a somewhat opposite point of view, as he believes one should be extremely cautious about stating a conjecture so people don’t waste time working on it. He said once, only half-jokingly:
Since we reward people for making a right conjecture, maybe we should punish those who make a wrong conjecture. Say, cut off their fingers. [Peter Sarnak, UCLA, c. 2012]
This is not an exact quote — I am paraphrasing from memory. Needless to say, I disagree. I don’t know how many fingers he wished Erdős should lose, since some of his conjectures were definitely disproved: one, two, three, four, five, and six. This is not me gloating, the opposite in fact. When you are stating hundreds of conjectures in the span of almost 50 years, having only a handful to be disproved is an amazing batting average. It would, however, make me happy if Sarnak’s conjecture is disproved someday.
Finally, there is a bit of a controversy whether conjectures are worth as much as theorems. This is aptly summarized in this quote about yet another champion of conjectures:
Louis J. Mordell [in his book review] questioned Hardy‘s assessment that Ramanujan was a man whose native talent was equal to that of Euler or Jacobi. Mordell [..] claims that one should judge a mathematician by what he has actually done, by which Mordell seems to mean, the theorems he has proved. Mordell’s assessment seems quite wrong to me. I think that a felicitous but unproved conjecture may be of much more consequence for mathematics than the proof of many a respectable theorem. [Atle Selberg, “Reflections Around the Ramanujan Centenary“, 1988]
So, what’s the problem?
Well, the way I see it, the efforts made towards proving vs. disproving conjectures is greatly out of balance. Despite all the high-minded Popper’s claims about “severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures“, I don’t think there is much truth to that in modern math sciences. This does not mean that disproofs of famous conjectures aren’t celebrated. Sometimes they are, see below. But it’s clear to me that the proofs are celebrated more frequently, and to a much greater degree. I have only anecdotal evidence to support my claim, but bear with me.
Take prizes. Famously, Clay Math Institute gives $1 million for a solution of any of these major open problems. But look closely at the rules. According to the item 5b, except for the P vs. NP problem and the Navier–Stokes Equation problem, it gives nothing ($0) for a disproof of these problems. Why, oh why?? Let’s look into CMI’s “primary objectives and purposes“:
To recognize extraordinary achievements and advances in mathematical research.
So it sounds like CMI does not think that disproving the Riemann Hypothesis needs to be rewarded because this wouldn’t “advance mathematical research”. Surely, you are joking? Whatever happened to “the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth“? Why does the CMI wants to put its thumb on the scale and support only one side? Do they not want to find out the solution whatever it is? Shouldn’t they be eager to dispense with the “wrong conjecture” so as to save numerous researches from “advances to nowhere“?
I am sure you can see that my blood is boiling, but let’s proceed to the P vs. NP problem. What if it’s independent of ZFC? Clearly, CMI wouldn’t pay for proving that. Why not? It’s not like this kind of thing never happened before (see obligatory link to CH). Some people believe that (or at least they did in 2012), and some people like Scott Aaronson take this seriously enough. Wouldn’t this be a great result worthy of an award as much as the proof that P=NP, or at least a nonconstructive proof that P=NP?
If your head is not spinning hard enough, here is another amusing quote:
Of course, it’s possible that P vs. NP is unprovable, but that that fact itself will forever elude proof: indeed, maybe the question of the independence of P vs. NP is itself independent of set theory, and so on ad infinitum! But one can at least say that, if P vs. NP (or for that matter, the Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach’s conjecture, etc.) were proven independent of ZF, it would be an unprecedented development. [Scott Aaronson, P vs. NP, 2016].
Speaking of Goldbach’s Conjecture, the most talked about and the most intuitively correct statement in Number Theory that I know. In a publicity stunt, for two years there was a $1 million prize by a publishing house for the proof of the conjecture. Why just for the proof? I never heard of anyone not believing the conjecture. If I was the insurance underwriter for the prize (I bet they had one), I would allow them to use “for the proof or disproof” for a mere extra $100 in premium. For another $50 I would let them use “or independent of ZF” — it’s a free money, so why not? It’s such a pernicious idea of rewarding only one kind of research outcome!
Curiously, even for Goldbach’s Conjecture, there is a mild divergence of POVs on what the future holds. For example, Popper writes (twice in the same book!) that:
[On whether Goldbach’s Conjecture is ‘demonstrable’] We don’t know: perhaps we may never know, and perhaps we can never know. [Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 1963]
Ugh. Perhaps. I suppose anything can happen… For example, our civilizations can “perhaps” die out in the next 200 years. But is that likely? Shouldn’t the gloomy past be a warning, not a prediction of the future? The only thing more outrageously pessimistic is this theological gem of a quote:
Not even God knows the number of permutations of 1000 avoiding the 1324 pattern. [Doron Zeilberger, quoted here, 2005]
Thanks, Doron! What a way to encourage everyone! Since we know from numerical estimates that this number is ≈ 3.7 × 101017 (see this paper and this follow up), Zeilberger is suggesting that large pattern avoidance numbers are impossibly hard to compute precisely, already in the range of only about 1018 digits. I really hope he is proved wrong in his lifetime.
But I digress. What I mean to emphasize, is that there are many ways a problem can be resolved. Yet some outcomes are considered more valuable than others. Shouldn’t the research achievements be rewarded, not the desired outcome? Here is yet another colorful opinion on this:
Given a conjecture, the best thing is to prove it. The second best thing is to disprove it. The third best thing is to prove that it is not possible to disprove it, since it will tell you not to waste your time trying to disprove it. That’s what Gödel did for the Continuum Hypothesis. [Saharon Shelah, Rutgers Univ. Colloqium, 2001]
Why do I care?
For one thing, disproving conjectures is part of what I do. Sometimes people are a little shy to unambiguously state them as formal conjectures, so they phrase them as questions or open problems, but then clarify that they believe the answer is positive. This is a distinction without a difference, or at least I don’t see any (maybe they are afraid of Sarnak’s wrath?) Regardless, proving their beliefs wrong is still what I do.
For example, here is my old bog post on my disproof of the Noonan-Zeiberger Conjecture (joint with Scott Garrabrant). And in this recent paper (joint with Danny Nguyen), we disprove in one big swoosh both Barvinok’s Problem, Kannan’s Problem, and Woods Conjecture. Just this year I disproved three conjectures:
The Kirillov–Klyachko Conjecture (2004) that the reduced Kronecker coefficients satisfy the saturation property (this paper, joint with Greta Panova).
The Brandolini et al. Conjecture (2019) that concrete lattice polytopes can multitile the space (this paper, joint with Alexey Garber).
Kenyon’s Problem (c. 2005) that every integral curve in R3 is a boundary of a PL surface comprised of unit triangles (this paper, joint with Alexey Glazyrin).
On top of that, just two months ago in this paper (joint with Han Lyu), we showed that the remarkable independence heuristic by I. J. Good for the number of contingency tables, fails badly even for nearly all uniform marginals. This is not exactly disproof of a conjecture, but it’s close, since the heuristic was introduced back in 1950 and continues to work well in practice.
In addition, I am currently working on disproving two more old conjectures which will remain unnamed until the time we actually resolve them (which might never happen, of course). In summary, I am deeply vested in disproving conjectures. The reasons why are somewhat complicated (see some of them below). But whatever my reasons, I demand and naively fully expect that my disproofs be treated on par with proofs, regardless whether this expectation bears any relation to reality.
My favorite disproofs and counterexamples:
There are many. Here are just a few, some famous and some not-so-famous, in historical order:
Fermat‘s conjecture (letter to Pascal, 1640) on primality of Fermat numbers, disproved by Euler (1747)
Tait’s conjecture (1884) on hamiltonicity of graphs of simple 3-polytopes, disproved by W.T. Tutte (1946)
General Burnside Problem (1902) on finiteness of periodic groups, resolved negatively by E.S. Golod (1964)
Keller’s conjecture (1930) on tilings with unit hypercubes, disproved by Jeff Lagarias and Peter Shor (1992)
Borsuk’s Conjecture (1932) on partitions of convex sets into parts of smaller diameter, disproved by Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai (1993)
Hirsch Conjecture (1957) on the diameter of graphs of convex polytopes, disproved by Paco Santos (2010)
Woods’s conjecture (1972) on the covering radius of certain lattices, disproved by Oded Regev, Uri Shapira and Barak Weiss (2017)
Connes embedding problem (1976), resolved negatively by Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright and Henry Yuen (2020)
In all these cases, the disproofs and counterexamples didn’t stop the research. On the contrary, they gave a push to further (sometimes numerous) developments in the area.
Why should you disprove conjectures?
There are three reasons, of different nature and importance.
First, disproving conjectures is opportunistic. As mentioned above, people seem to try proving much harder than they try disproving. This creates niches of opportunity for an open-minded mathematician.
Second, disproving conjectures is beautiful. Let me explain. Conjectures tend to be rigid, as in “objects of the type pqr satisfy property abc.” People like me believe in the idea of “universality“. Some might call it “completeness” or even “Murphy’s law“, but the general principle is always the same. Namely: it is not sufficient that one wishes that all pqr satisfy abc to actually believe in the implication; rather, there has to be a strong reason why abc should hold. Barring that, pqr can possibly be almost anything, so in particular non-abc. While some would argue that non-abc objects are “ugly” or at least “not as nice” as abc, the idea of universality means that your objects can be of every color of the rainbow — nice color, ugly color, startling color, quiet color, etc. That kind of palette has its own sense of beauty, but it’s an acquired taste I suppose.
Third, disproving conjectures is constructive. It depends on the nature of the conjecture, of course, but one is often faced with necessity to construct a counterexample. Think of this as an engineering problem of building some pqr which at the same time is not abc. Such construction, if at all possible, might be difficult, time consuming and computer assisted. But so what? What would you rather do: build a mile-high skyscraper (none exist yet) or prove that this is impossible? Curiously, in CS Theory both algorithms and (many) complexity results are constructive (you need gadgets). Even the GCT is partially constructive, although explaining that would take us awhile.
What should the institutions do?
If you are an institution which awards prizes, stop with the legal nonsense: “We award […] only for a publication of a proof in a top journal”. You need to set up a scientific committee anyway, since otherwise it’s hard to tell sometimes if someone deserves a prize. With mathematicians you can expect anything anyway. Some would post two arXiv preprints, give a few lectures and then stop answering emails. Others would publish only in a journal where they are Editor-in-Chief. It’s stranger than fiction, really.
What you should do is say in the official rules: “We have [this much money] and an independent scientific committee which will award any progress on [this problem] partially or in full as they see fit.” Then a disproof or an independence result will receive just as much as the proof (what’s done is done, what else are you going to do with the money?) This would also allow some flexibility for partial solutions. Say, somebody proves Goldbach’s Conjecture for integers > exp(exp(10100000)), way way beyond computational powers for the remaining integers to be checked. I would give this person at least 50% of the prize money, leaving the rest for future developments of possibly many people improving on the bound. However, under the old prize rules such person gets bupkes for their breakthrough.
What should the journals do?
In short, become more open to results of computational and experimental nature. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a summary of Zeilberger’s Opinions, viewed charitably. He is correct on this. This includes publishing results of the type “Based on computational evidence we believe in the following UVW conjecture” or “We develop a new algorithm which confirms the UVW conjecture for n<13″. These are still contributions to mathematics, and the journals should learn to recognize them as such.
To put in context of our theme, it is clear that a lot more effort has been placed on proofs than on finding counterexamples. However, in many areas of mathematics there are no small counterexamples, so a heavy computational effort is crucial for any hope of finding one. Such work is not be as glamorous as traditional papers. But really, when it comes to standards, if a journal is willing to publish the study of something like the “null graphs“, the ship has sailed for you…
Let me give you a concrete example where a computational effort is indispensable. The curious Lovász conjecture states that every finite connected vertex-transitive graph contains a Hamiltonian path. This conjecture got to be false. It hits every red flag — there is really no reason why pqr = “vertex transitive” should imply abc = “Hamiltonian”. The best lower bound for the length of the longest (self-avoiding) path is only about square root of the number of vertices. In fact, even the original wording by Lovász shows he didn’t believe the conjecture is true (also, I asked him and he confirmed).
Unfortunately, proving that some potential counterexample is not Hamiltonian is computationally difficult. I once had an idea of one (a nice cubic Cayley graph on “only” 3600 vertices), but Bill Cook quickly found a Hamiltonian cycle dashing my hopes (it was kind of him to look into this problem). Maybe someday, when the TSP solvers are fast enough on much larger graphs, it will be time to return to this problem and thoroughly test it on large Cayley graphs. But say, despite long odds, I succeed and find a counterexample. Would a top journal publish such a paper?
Editor’s dilemma
There are three real criteria for evaluation a solution of an open problem by the journal:
Is this an old, famous, or well-studied problem?
Are the tools interesting or innovative enough to be helpful in future studies?
Are the implications of the solution to other problems important enough?
Now let’s make a hypothetical experiment. Let’s say a paper is submitted to a top math journal which solves a famous open problem in Combinatorics. Further, let’s say somebody already proved it is equivalent to a major problem in TCS. This checks criteria 1 and 3. Until not long ago it would be rejected regardless, so let’s assume this is happening relatively recently.
Now imagine two parallel worlds, where in the first world the conjecture is proved on 2 pages using beautiful but elementary linear algebra, and in the second world the conjecture is disproved on a 2 page long summary of a detailed computational search. So in neither world we have much to satisfy criterion 2. Now, a quiz: in which world the paper will be published?
If you recognized that the first world is a story of Hao Huang‘s elegant proof of the induced subgraphs of hypercubes conjecture, which implies the sensitivity conjecture. The Annals published it, I am happy to learn, in a welcome break with the past. But unless we are talking about some 200 year old famous conjecture, I can’t imagine the Annals accepting a short computational paper in the second world. Indeed, it took a bit of a scandal to accept even the 400 year old Kepler’s conjecture which was proved in a remarkable computational work.
Now think about this. Is any of that fair? Shouldn’t we do better as a community on this issue?
What do other people do?
Over the years I asked a number of people about the uncertainty created by the conjectures and what do they do about it. The answers surprised me. Here I am paraphrasing them:
Some were dumbfounded: “What do you mean this conjecture could be false? It has to be true, otherwise nothing I am doing make much sense.”
Others were simplistic: “It’s an important conjecture. Famous people said it’s true. It’s my job to prove it.”
Third were defensive: “Do you really think this conjecture could be wrong? Why don’t you try to disprove it then? We’ll see who is right.”
Fourth were biblical: “I tend to work 6 days a week towards the proof and one day towards the disproof.”
Fifth were practical: “I work on the proof until I hit a wall. I use the idea of this obstacle to try constructing potential counterexamples. When I find an approach to discard such counterexamples, I try to generalize the approach to continue working on the proof. Continue until either side wins.”
If the last two seem sensible to you to, that’s because they are. However, I bet fourth are just grandstanding — no way they actually do that. The fifth sound great when this is possible, but that’s exceedingly rare, in my opinion. We live in a technical age when proving new results often requires great deal of effort and technology. You likely have tools and intuition to work in only one direction. Why would you want to waste time working in another?
What should you do?
First, remember to make conjectures. Every time you write a paper, tell a story of what you proved. Then tell a story of what you wanted to prove but couldn’t. State it in the form of a conjecture. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, or be right but oversharing your ideas. It’s a downside, sure. But the upside is that your conjecture might prove very useful to others, especially young researchers. In might advance the area, or help you find a collaborator to resolve it.
Second, learn to check your conjectures computationally in many small cases. It’s important to give supporting evidence so that others take your conjectures seriously.
Third, learn to make experiments, explore the area computationally. That’s how you make new conjectures.
Fourth, understand yourself. Your skill, your tools. Your abilities like problem solving, absorbing information from the literature, or making bridges to other fields. Faced with a conjecture, use this knowledge to understand whether at least in principle you might be able to prove or disprove a conjecture.
Fifth, actively look for collaborators. Those who have skills, tools, or abilities you are missing. More importantly, they might have a different POV on the validity of the conjecture and how one might want to attack it. Argue with them and learn from them.
Sixth, be brave and optimistic! Whether you decide to prove, disprove a conjecture, or simply state a new conjecture, go for it! Ignore the judgements by the likes of Sarnak and Zeilberger. Trust me — they don’t really mean it.
Recently, there has been plenty of discussions on math journals, their prices, behavior, technology and future. I have been rather reluctant to join the discussion in part due to my own connection to Elsevier, in part because things in Combinatorics are more complicated than in other areas of mathematics (see below), but also because I couldn’t reconcile several somewhat conflicting thoughts that I had. Should all existing editorial boards revolt and all journals be electronic? Or perhaps should we move to “pay-for-publishing” model? Or even “crowd source refereeing”? Well, now that the issue a bit cooled down, I think I figured out exactly what should happen to math journals. Be patient – a long explanation is coming below.
Quick test questions
I would like to argue that the debate over the second question is the general misunderstanding of the first question in the title. In fact, I am pretty sure most mathematicians are quite a bit confused on this, for a good reason. If you think this is easy, quick, answer the following three questions:
1) Published paper has a technical mistake invalidating the main result. Is this a fault of author, referee(s), handling editor, managing editor(s), a publisher, or all of the above? If the reader find such mistake, who she/he is to contact?
2) Published paper proves special case of a known result published 20 years earlier in an obscure paper. Same question. Would the answer change if the author lists the paper in the references?
3) Published paper is written in a really poor English. Sections are disorganized and the introduction is misleading. Same question.
Now that you gave your answers, ask a colleague. Don’t be surprised to hear a different point of view. Or at least don’t be surprised when you hear mine.
What do referees do?
In theory, a lot. In practice, that depends. There are few official journal guides to referees, but there are several well meaning guides (see also here, here, here, here §4.10, and a nice discussion by Don Knuth §15). However, as any editor can tell you, you never know what exactly did the referee do. Some reply within 5 min, some after 2 years. Some write one negative sentence, some 20 detailed pages, some give an advice in the style “yeah, not a bad paper, cites me twice, why not publish it”, while others a brushoff “not sure who this person is, and this problem is indeed strongly related to what I and my collaborators do, but of course our problems are much more interesting/important – rejection would be best”. The anonymity is so relaxing, doing a poor job is just too tempting. The whole system hinges on the shame, sense of responsibility, and personal relationship with the editor.
A slightly better questions is “What do good referees do?” The answer is – they don’t just help the editor make acceptance/rejection decision. They help the authors. They add some background the authors don’t know, look for missing references, improve on the proofs, critique the exposition and even notation. They do their best, kind of what ideal advisors do for their graduate students, who just wrote an early draft of their first ever math paper.
In summary, you can’t blame the referees for anything. They do what they can and as much work as they want. To make a lame comparison, the referees are like wind and the editors are a bit like sailors. While the wind is free, it often changes direction, sometimes completely disappears, and in general quite unreliable. But sometimes it can really take you very far. Of course, crowd sourcing refereeing is like democracy in the army – bad even in theory, and never tried in practice.
First interlude: refereeing war stories
I recall a curious story by Herb Wilf, on how Don Knuth submitted a paper under assumed name with an obscure college address, in order to get full refereeing treatment (the paper was accepted and eventually published under Knuth’s real name). I tried this once, to unexpected outcome (let me not name the journal and the stupendous effort I made to create a fake identity). The referee wrote that the paper was correct, rather interesting but “not quite good enough” for their allegedly excellent journal. The editor was very sympathetic if a bit condescending, asking me not to lose hope, work on my papers harder and submit them again. So I tried submitting to a competing but equal in statue journal, this time under my own name. The paper was accepted in a matter of weeks. You can judge for yourself the moral of this story.
A combinatorialist I know (who shall remain anonymous) had the following story with Duke J. Math. A year and a half after submission, the paper was rejected with three (!) reports mostly describing typos. The authors were dismayed and consulted a CS colleague. That colleague noticed that the three reports were in .pdf but made by cropping from longer files. Turns out, if the cropping is made straightforwardly, the cropped portions are still hidden in the files. Using some hacking software the top portions of the reports were uncovered. The authors discovered that they are extremely positive, giving great praise of the paper. Now the authors believe that the editor despised combinatorics (or their branch of combinatorics) and was fishing for a bad report. After three tries, he gave up and sent them cropped reports lest they think somebody else considers their paper worthy of publishing in the grand old Duke (cf. what Zeilberger wrote about Duke).
Another one of my stories is with the Journal of AMS. A year after submission, one of my papers was rejected with the following remarkable referee report which I quote here in full:
The results are probably well known. The authors should consult with experts.
Needless to say, the results were new, and the paper was quickly published elsewhere. As they say, “resistance is futile“.
What do associate/handling editors do?
Three little things, really. They choose referees, read their reports and make the decisions. But they are responsible for everything. And I mean for everything, both 1), 2) and 3). If the referee wrote a poorly researched report, they should recognize this and ignore it, request another one. They should ensure they have more than one opinion on the paper, all of them highly informed and from good people. If it seems the authors are not aware of the literature and referee(s) are not helping, they should ensure this is fixed. It the paper is not well written, the editors should ask the authors to rewrite it (or else). At Discrete Mathematics, we use this page by Doug West, as a default style to math grammar. And if the reader finds a mistake, he/she should first contact the editor. Contacting the author(s) is also a good idea, but sometimes the anonymity is helpful – the editor can be trusted to bring bad news and if possible, request a correction.
B.H. Neumann described here how he thinks the journal should operate. I wish his views held widely today. The book by Krantz, §5.5, is a good outline of the ideal editorial experience, and this paper outlines how to select referees. However, this discussion (esp. Rick Durrett’s “rambling”) is more revealing. Now, the reason most people are confused as to who is responsible for 1), 2) and 3), is the fact that while some journals have serious proactive editors, others do not, or their work is largely invisible.
What do managing editors and publishers do?
In theory, managing editors hire associate editors, provide logistical support, distribute paper load, etc. In practice they also serve as handling editors for a large number of papers. The publishers… You know what the publishers do. Most importantly, they either pay editors or they don’t. They either charge libraries a lot, or they don’t. Publishing is a business, after all…
Who wants free universal electronic publishing?
Good mathematicians. Great mathematicians. Mathematicians who write well and see no benefit in their papers being refereed. Mathematicians who have many students and wish the publishing process was speedier and less cumbersome, so their students can get good jobs. Mathematicians who do not value the editorial work and are annoyed when the paper they want to read is “by subscription only” and thus unavailable. In general, these are people who see having to publish as an obstacle, not as a benefit.
Who does not want free universal electronic publishing?
Publishers (of course), libraries, university administrators. These are people and establishments who see value in existing order and don’t want it destroyed. Also: mediocre mathematicians, bad mathematicians, mathematicians from poor countries, mathematicians who don’t have access to good libraries (perhaps, paradoxically). In general, people who need help with their papers. People who don’t want a quick brush-off “not good enough” or “probably well known”, but those who need advice on the references, on their English, on how the papers are structured and presented, and on what to do next.
So, who is right?
Everyone. For some mathematicians, having all journals to be electronic with virtually no cost is an overall benefit. But at the very least, “pro status quo” crowd have a case, in my view. I don’t mean that Elsevier pricing policy is reasonable, I am talking about the big picture here. In a long run, I think of journals as non-profit NGO‘s, some kind of nerdy versions of Nobel Peace Prize winning Médecins Sans Frontières. While I imagine that in the future many excellent top level journals will be electronic and free, I also think many mid-level journals in specific areas will be run by non-profit publishers, not free at all, and will employ a number of editorial and technical stuff to help the authors, both of papers they accept and reject. This is a public service we should strive to perform, both for the sake of those math papers, and for development of mathematics in other countries.
Right now, the number of mathematicians in the world is already rather large and growing. Free journals can do only so much. Without high quality editors paid by the publishers, with a large influx of papers from the developing world, there is a chance we might loose the traditional high standards for published second tier papers. And I really don’t want to think of a mathematics world once the peer review system is broken. That’s why I am not in the “free publishing camp” – in an effort to save money, we might loose something much more valuable – the system which gives foundation and justification of our work.
Second interlude: journals vis-à-vis combinatorics
I already wrote about the fate of combinatorics papers in the Annals, especially when comparison with Number Theory. My view was gloomy but mildly optimistic. In fact, since that post was written couple more combinatorics papers has been accepted. Good. But let me give you a quiz. Here are two comparable highly selective journals – Duke J. Math. and Composito Math. In the past 10 years Composito published exactly one (!) paper in Combinatorics (defined as primary MSC=05), of the 631 total. In the same period, Duke published 8 combinatorics papers of 681 total.
Q: Which of the two (Composito or Duke) treats combinatorics papers better?
A: Composito, of course.
The reasoning is simple. Forget the anecdotal evidence in the previous interlude. Just look at the “aim and scope” of the journals vs. these numbers. Here is what Compsito website says with a refreshing honesty:
By tradition, the journal published by the foundation focuses on papers in the main stream of pure mathematics. This includes the fields of algebra, number theory, topology, algebraic and analytic geometry and (geometric) analysis. Papers on other topics are welcome if they are of interest not only to specialists.
Translation: combinatorics papers are not welcome (as are papers in many other fields). I think this is totally fair. Nothing wrong with that. Clearly, there are journals which publish mostly in combinatorics, and where papers in none of these fields would be welcome. In fact there is a good historical reason for that. Compare this with what Duke says on its website:
Published by Duke University Press since its inception in 1935, the Duke Mathematical Journal is one of the world’s leading mathematical journals. Without specializing in a small number of subject areas, it emphasizes the most active and influential areas of current mathematics.
See the difference? They don’t name their favorite areas! How are the authors supposed to guess which are these? Clearly, Combinatorics with its puny 1% proportion of Duke papers is not a subject area that Duke “emphasizes”. Compare it with 104 papers in Number Theory (16%) and 124 papers in Algebraic Geometry (20%) over the same period. Should we conclude that in the past 10 years, Combinatorics was not “the most active and influential”, or perhaps not “mathematics” at all? (yes, some people think so) I have my own answer to this question, and I bet so do you…
Note also, that things used to be different at Duke. For example, exactly 40 years earlier, in the period 1963-1973, Duke published 47 papers in combinatorics out of 972 total, even though the area was only in its first stages of development. How come? The reason is simple: Leonard Carlitz was Managing Editor at the time, and he welcomed papers from a number of prominent combinatorialists active during that time, such as Andrews, Gould, Moon, Riordan, Stanley, Subbarao, etc., as well as a many of his own papers.
So, ideally, what will happen to math journals?
That’s actually easy. Here are my few recommendations and predictions.
1) We should stop with all these geography based journals. That’s enough. I understand the temptation for each country, or university, or geographical entity to have its own math journal, but nowadays this is counterproductive and a cause for humor. This parochial patriotism is perhaps useful in sports (or not), but is nonsense in mathematics. New journals should emphasize new/rapidly growing areas of mathematics underserved by current journals, not new locales where printing presses are available.
2) Existing for profit publishers should realize that with the growth of arXiv and free online competitors, their business model is unsustainable. Eventually all these journals will reorganize into a non-profit institutions or foundations. This does not mean that the journals will become electronic or free. While some probably will, others will remain expensive, have many paid employees (including editors), and will continue to provide services to the authors, all supported by library subscriptions. These extra services are their raison d’être, and will need to be broadly advertised. The authors would learn not to be surprised of a quick one line report from free journals, and expect a serious effort from “expensive journals”.
3) The journals will need to rethink their structure and scope, and try to develop their unique culture and identity. If you have two similar looking free electronic journals, which do not add anything to the papers other than their .sty file, the difference is only the editorial board and history of published papers. This is not enough. All journals, except for the very top few, will have to start limiting their scope to emphasize the areas of their strength, and be honest and clear in advertising these areas. Alternatively, other journals will need to reorganize and split their editorial board into clearly defined fields. Think Proc. LMS, Trans. AMS, or a brand new Sigma, which basically operate as dozens of independent journals, with one to three handling editors in each. While highly efficient, in a long run this strategy is also unsustainable as it leads to general confusion and divergence in the quality of these sub-journals.
4) Even among the top mathematicians, there is plenty of confusion on the quality of existing mathematics journals, some of which go back many decades. See e.g. a section of Tim Gowers’s post about his views of the quality of various Combinatorics journals, since then helpfully updated and corrected. But at least those of us who have been in the area for a while, have the memory of the fortune of previously submitted papers, whether our own, or our students, or colleagues. A circumstantial evidence is better than nothing. For the newcomers or outsiders, such distinctions between journals are a mystery. The occasional rankings (impact factor or this, whatever this is) are more confusing than helpful.
What needs to happen is a new system of awards recognizing achievements of individual journals and/or editors, in their efforts to improve the quality of the journals, attracting top papers in the field, arranging fast refereeing, etc. Think a mixture of Pulitzer Prize and J.D. Power and Associates awards – these would be a great help to understand the quality of the journals. For example, the editors of the Annals clearly hustled to referee within a month in this case (even if motivated by PR purposes). It’s an amazing speed for a technical 50+ page paper, and this effort deserves recognition.
Full disclosure: Of the journals I singled out, I have published once in both JAMS and Duke. Neither paper is in Combinatorics, but both are in Discrete Mathematics, when understood broadly.
Imagine you have plenty of money and dozens of volunteers. You decide to award one or two fellowships a year to the best of the best of the best in math sciences. Easy, right? Then how do you repeatedly fail at this, without anyone notice? Let me tell you how. It’s an interesting story, so bear with me.
A small warning. Although it may seem I am criticizing Hertz Foundation, my intention is to show its weakness so it can improve.
What is the Hertz Foundation?
Yesterday I wrote a recommendation letter to the Hertz Foundation. Although a Fellow myself, I never particularly cared for the foundation, mostly because it changed so little in my life (I received it only for two out of five years of eligibility). But I became rather curious as to what usually happens to Hertz Fellows. I compiled the data, and found the results quite disheartening. While perhaps excellent in other fields, I came to believe that Hertz does barely a mediocre job awarding fellowships in mathematics. And now that I think about it, this was all completely predictable.
First, a bit of history. John Hertz was the Yellow Cab founder and car rental entrepreneur (thus the namesake company), and he left a lot of money dedicated for education in “applied physical sciences”, now understood to include applied mathematics. What exactly is “applied mathematics” is rather contentious, so the foundation wisely decided that “it is up to each fellowship applicant to advocate to us his or her specific field of interest as an ‘applied physical science’.”
In practice, according to the website, about 600 applicants in all areas of science and engineering apply for a fellowship. Applications are allowed only either in the senior year of college or 1st year of grad school. The fellowships are generous and include both the stipend and the tuition; between 15 and 20 students are awarded every year. Only US citizen and permanent residents are eligible, and the fellowship can be used only in one of the 47 “tenable schools” (more on this below). The Foundation sorts the applications, and volunteers interview some of them in the first round. In the second round, pretty much only one person interviews all that advanced, and the decision is made. Historically, only one or two fellowships in mathematical sciences are awarded each year (this includes pure math, applied math, and occasionally theoretical CS or statistics).
Forty years of Math Hertz Fellowships in numbers
The Hertz Foundation website has a data on all past fellows. I compiled the data in Hertz-list which spanned 40 years (1971-2010), listed by the year the fellowship ended, which usually but not always coincided with graduation. There were 67 awardees in mathematics, which makes it about 1.7 fellowships a year. The Foundation states that it awarded “over 1000 fellowships” so I guess about 5-6% went into maths (perhaps, fewer in recent years). Here is who gets them.
1) Which schools are awarded? Well, only 44 US graduate programs are allowed to administer the fellowships. The reasons (other than logistical) are unclear to me. Of those programs that are “in”, you have University of Rochester (which nearly lost its graduate program), and UC Santa Cruz (where rumors say a similar move had been considered). Those which are “out” include graduate programs at Brown, UPenn, Rutgers, UNC Chapel Hill, etc. The real distribution is much more skewed, of course. Here is a complete list of awards per institution:
MIT – 14
Harvard, Princeton – 8
Caltech, NYU – 7
Berkeley, Stanford – 5
UCLA – 3
CMU, Cornell, U Chicago – 2
GA Tech, JHU, RPI, Rice – 1
In summary, only 15 universities had at least one award (34%), and just 7 universities were awarded 54 fellowships (i.e. 16% of universities received 81% of all fellowships). There is nothing wrong with this per se, just a variation on the 80-20 rule you might argue. But wait! Hertz Foundation is a non-profit institution and the fellowship itself comes with a “moral commitment“. Even if you need to interfere with “free marketplace” of acceptance decisions (see P.S. below), wouldn’t it be in the spirit of John Hertz’s original goal, to make a special effort to distribute the awards more widely? For example, Simons Foundation is not shy about awarding fellowship to institutions many of which are not even | |||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 35 | https://cacm.acm.org/research/fifty-years-of-p-vs-np-and-the-possibility-of-the-impossible/ | en | Fifty Years of P vs. NP and the Possibility of the Impossible – Communications of the ACM | [
"https://cacm.acm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/August2024.Cover_.1000x1338.jpg?w=1000",
"https://cacm.acm.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/121521_CACMpg77_Fifty-Years-PNP.jpg",
"https://cacm.acm.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/121521_CACMpg77_Fifty-Years-PNP.jpg?w=250",
"https://dl.acm.org/cms/attachment/d96dc... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"Lance Fortnow",
"Doug Meil",
"Bennie Mols",
"Herbert Bruderer"
] | 2022-01-01T00:00:00-05:00 | en | https://cacm.acm.org/research/fifty-years-of-p-vs-np-and-the-possibility-of-the-impossible/ | On May 4, 1971, computer scientist/mathematician Steve Cook introduced the P vs. NP problem to the world in his paper, “The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures.” More than 50 years later, the world is still trying to solve it. In fact, I addressed the subject 12 years ago in a Communications article, “The Status of the P versus NP Problem.”13
Back to Top
Key Insights
The P vs. NP problem turned 50 in 2021 and its resolution remains far out of reach. Dramatic advances in algorithms and hardware have allowed us to tackle manv NP-complete problems while making little progress breaking cryptographic systems.
As we continue to make dramatic progress in machine learning and data-centric computing, P vs. NP can give us a valuable lens to view what is and is not possible for the future of learning.
While P vs. NP began as a way to difficult problems to solve computationally, we now view the problem as a way to chart the future possibilities for our field.
The P vs. NP problem, and the theory behind it, has not changed dramatically since that 2009 article, but the world of computing most certainly has. The growth of cloud computing has helped to empower social networks, smartphones, the gig economy, fintech, spatial computing, online education, and, perhaps most importantly, the rise of data science and machine learning. In 2009, the top 10 companies by market cap included a single Big Tech company: Microsoft. As of September 2020, the first seven are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent.38 The number of computer science (CS) graduates in the U.S. more than tripled8 and does not come close to meeting demand.
Rather than simply revise or update the 2009 survey, I have chosen to view advances in computing, optimization, and machine learning through a P vs. NP lens. I look at how these advances bring us closer to a world in which P = NP, the limitations still presented by P vs. NP, and the new opportunities of study which have been created. In particular, I look at how we are heading toward a world I call “Optiland,” where we can almost miraculously gain many of the advantages of P = NP while avoiding some of the disadvantages, such as breaking cryptography.
As an open mathematical problem, P vs. NP remains one of the most important; it is listed on the Clay Mathematical Institute’s Millennium Problems21 (the organization offers a million-dollar bounty for the solution). I close the article by describing some new theoretical computer science results that, while not getting us closer to solving the P vs. NP question, show us that thinking about P vs. NP still drives much of the important research in the area.
Back to Top
The P vs. NP Problem
Are there 300 Facebook users who are all friends with each other? How would you go about answering that question? Let’s assume you work at Facebook. You have access to the entire Facebook graph and can see which users are friends. You now need to write an algorithm to find that large clique of friends. You could try all groups of 300, but there are far too many to search them all. You could try something smarter, perhaps starting with small groups and merging them into bigger groups, but nothing you do seems to work. In fact, nobody knows of a significantly faster solution than to try all the groups, but neither do we know that no such solution exists.
This is basically the P vs. NP question. NP represents problems that have solutions you can check efficiently. If I tell you which 300 people might form a clique, you can check relatively quickly that the 44,850 pairs of users are all friends. Clique is an NP problem. P represents problems where you can find those solutions efficiently. We don’t know whether the clique problem is in P. Perhaps, surprisingly, Clique has a property called NP-complete—that is, we can efficiently solve the Clique problem quickly if and only if P = NP. Many other problems have this property, including 3-Coloring (can a map be colored using only three colors so that no two neighboring countries have the same color?), Traveling Salesman (find the shortest route through a list of cities, visiting every city and returning to the starting place), and tens to hundreds of thousands of others.
Formally, P stands for “polynomial time,” the class of problems that one can solve in time bounded by a fixed polynomial in the length of the input. NP stands for “nondeterministic polynomial time,” where one can use a nondeterministic machine that can magically choose the best answer. For the purposes of this survey, it is best to think of P and NP simply as efficiently computable and efficiently checkable.
For those who want a longer informal discussion on the importance of the P vs. NP problem, see the 2009 survey13 or the popular science book based on that survey.14 For a more technical introduction, the 1979 book by Michael Garey and David Johnson16 has held up surprisingly well and remains an invaluable reference for those who need to understand which problems are NP-complete.
Back to Top
Why Talk About It Now?
On that Tuesday afternoon in 1971, when Cook presented his paper to ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing attendees at the Stouffer’s Somerset Inn in Shaker Heights, OH, he proved that Satisfiability is NP-complete and Tautology is NP-hard.10 The theorems suggest that Tautology is a good candidate for an interesting set not in [P], and I feel it is worth spending considerable effort trying to prove this conjecture. Such a proof would represent a major breakthrough in complexity theory.
Dating a mathematical concept is almost always a challenge, and there are many other possible times where we can start the P vs. NP clock. The basic notions of algorithms and proofs date back to at least the ancient Greeks, but as far as we know they never considered a general problem such as P vs. NP. The basics of efficient computation and nondeterminism were developed in the 1960s. The P vs. NP question was formulated earlier than that, we just didn’t know it.
The P vs. NP problem, and the theory behind it, has not changed dramatically, but the world of computing most certainly has.
Kurt Gödel wrote a letter17 in 1956 to John von Neumann that essentially described the P vs. NP problem. It is not clear if von Neumann, then suffering from cancer, ever read the letter, which was not discovered and widely distributed until 1988. The P vs. NP question didn’t really become a phenomenon until Richard Karp published his 1972 paper23 showing that a large number of well-known combinatorial problems were NP-complete, including Clique, 3-Coloring, and Traveling Salesman. In 1973, Leonid Levin, then in Russia, published a paper based on his independent 1971 research that defined the P vs. NP problem.27 By the time Levin’s paper reached the west, P vs. NP had already established itself as computing’s most important question.
Back to Top
Optiland
Russell Impagliazzo, in a classic 1995 paper,20 described five worlds with varying degrees of possibilities for the P vs. NP problem:
Algorithmica: P = NP or something “morally equivalent,” such as fast probabilistic algorithms for NP.
Heuristica: NP problems are hard in the worst case but easy on average.
Pessiland: We can easily create hard NP problems, but not hard NP problems where we know the solution. This is the worst of all possible worlds, since we can neither solve hard problems on average nor do we get any apparent cryptographic advantage from the difficulty of these problems.
Minicrypt: Cryptographic one-way functions exist, but we do not have public-key cryptography.
Cryptomania: Public-key cryptography is possible—that is, two parties can exchange secret messages over open channels.
These worlds are purposely not formally defined but rather suggest the unknown possibilities given our knowledge of the P vs. NP problem. The general belief, though not universal, is that we live in Cryptomania.
Impagliazzo draws upon a “you can’t have it all” from P vs. NP theory. You can either solve hard NP problems or have cryptography, but you can’t have both (you can have neither). Perhaps, though, we are heading to a de facto Optiland. Advances in machine learning and optimization in both software and hardware are allowing us to make progress on problems long thought difficult or impossible—from voice recognition to protein folding—and yet, for the most part, our cryptographic protocols remain secure.
In a section called “What if P=NP?” from the 2009 survey,13 I wrote, “Learning becomes easy by using the principle of Occam’s razor—we simply find the smallest program consistent with the data. Near-perfect vision recognition, language comprehension and translation, and all other learning tasks become trivial. We will also have much better predictions of weather and earthquakes and other natural phenomenon.”
Today, you can use face-scanning to unlock your smartphone, talk to the device to ask it a question and often get a reasonable answer, or have your question translated into a different language. Your phone receives alerts about weather and other climatic events, with far better predictions than we would have thought possible just a dozen years ago. Meanwhile, cryptography has gone mostly unscathed beyond brute-force-like attacks on small key lengths. Now let’s look at how recent advances in computing, optimization, and learning are leading us to Optiland.
Back to Top
Solving Hard Problems
In 2016, Bill Cook (no relation to Steve) and his colleagues decided to tackle the following challenge:9 How do you visit every pub in the U.K. in the shortest distance possible? They made a list of 24,727 pubs and created the ultimate pub crawl, a walking trip that spanned 45,495,239 meters—approximately 28,269 miles—a bit longer than walking around the earth.
Cook had cheated a bit, eliminating some pubs to keep the size reasonable. After some press coverage in the U.K.,7 many complained about missing their favorite watering holes. Cook and company went back to work, building up the list to 49,687 pubs. The new tour length would be 63,739,687 meters, or about 39,606 miles (see Figure). One needs just a 40% longer walk to reach more than twice as many pubs. The pub crawl is just a traveling salesman problem, one of the most famous of the NP-complete problems. The number of possible tours through all the 49,687 pubs is roughly three followed by 211,761 zeros. Of course, Cook’s computers don’t search the whole set of tours but use a variety of optimization techniques. Even more impressive, the tour comes with a proof of optimality based on linear program duality.
Figure. Shortest route through 49,687 U.K. pubs. Used by permission. (http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/uk).
Taking on a larger task, Cook and company aimed to find the shortest tour through more than two million stars where distances could be computed. Their tour of 28,884,456 parsecs is within a mere 683 parsecs of optimal.
Beyond Traveling Salesman, we have seen major advances in solving satisfiability and mixed-integer programming—a variation of linear programming where some, but not necessarily all, of the variables are required to be integers. Using highly refined heuristics, fast processors, specialized hardware, and distributed cloud computing, one can often solve problems that arise in practice with tens of thousands of variables and hundreds of thousands or even millions of constraints.
Faced with an NP problem to solve, one can often formulate the problem as a satisfiability or mixed-integer programming question and throw it at one of the top solvers. These tools have been used successfully in verification and automated testing of circuits and code, computational biology, system security, product and packaging design, financial trading, and even to solve some difficult mathematical problems.
Back to Top
Data Science and Machine Learning
Any reader of Communications and most everyone else cannot dismiss the transformative effects of machine learning, particularly learning by neural nets. The notion of modeling computation by artificial neurons—basically objects that compute weighted threshold functions—goes back to the work of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in the 1940s.28 In the 1990s, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun26 developed the basic algorithms that would power the learning of neural nets, a circuit of these neurons several layers deep. Faster and more distributed computing, specialized hardware, and enormous amounts of data helped propel machine learning to the point where it can accomplish many human-oriented tasks surprisingly well. ACM recognized the incredible impact the work of Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun has had in our society with the 2018 A.M. Turing Award.
How does machine learning mesh with P vs. NP? In this section, when we talk about P = NP, it will be in the very strong sense of all problems in NP having efficient algorithms in practice. Occam’s razor states that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” or, informally, that the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one. If P = NP, we can use this idea to create a strong learning algorithm: Find the smallest circuit consistent with the data. Even though we likely don’t have P = NP, machine learning can approximate this approach, which led to its surprising power. Nevertheless, the neural net is unlikely to be the “smallest” possible circuit. A neural net trained by today’s deep-learning techniques is typically fixed in structure with parameters that are only on the weights on the wires. To allow sufficient expressibility, there are often millions or more such weights. This limits the power of neural nets. They can do very well with face recognition, but they can’t learn to multiply based on examples.
Universal distribution and GPT-3. Consider distributions on the infinite set of binary strings. You can’t have a uniform distribution, but you could create distributions where every string of the same length has the same probability. However, some strings are simply more important than others. For example, the first million digits of π have more meaning than just a million digits generated at random. You might want to put a higher probability on the more meaningful strings. There are many ways to do this, but in fact there is a universal distribution that gets close to any other computable distribution (see Kirchherr et al.25) This distribution has great connections to learning—for example, any algorithm that learns with small error to this distribution will learn for all computable distributions. The catch is that this distribution is horribly non-computable even if P = NP. If P = NP, we still get something useful by creating an efficiently computable distribution universal to other efficiently computable distributions.
What do we get out of machine learning? Consider the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), particularly GPT-3 released in 2020.5 GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters trained on 410 billion tokens taken from as much of the written corpus as could be made available. It can answer questions, write essays given a prompt, and even do some coding. Though it has a long way to go, GPT-3 has drawn rave reviews for its ability to generate material that looks human-produced. One can view GPT-3 in some sense like a distribution, where we can look at the probability of outputs generated by the algorithm, a weak version of a universal distribution. If we restrict a universal distribution to have a given prefix, that provides a random sample prompted by that prefix. GPT-3 can also build on such prompts, handling a surprisingly wide range of domain knowledge without further training. As this line of research progresses, we will get closer to a universal metric from which one can perform built-in learning: Generate a random example from a given context.
Science and medicine. In science, we have made advances by doing large-scale simulations to understand, for example, exploring nuclear fusion reactions. Researchers can then apply a form of the scientific method: Create a hypothesis for a physical system; use that model to make a prediction; and then, instead of attempting to create an actual reaction, use an experimental simulation to test that prediction. If the answer is not as predicted, then change or throw away the model and start again.
After we have a strong model, we can then make that expensive test in a physical reactor. If P = NP, we could, as mentioned above, use an Occam’s Razor approach to create hypotheses—find the smallest circuits that are consistent with the data. Machine-learning techniques can work along these lines, automating the hypothesis creation. Given data—whether generated by simulations, experiments, or sensors—machine learning can create models that match the data. We can use these models to make predictions and then test those predictions as before.
While these techniques allow us to find hypotheses and models that might have been missed, they can also lead to false positives. We generally accept a hypothesis with a 95% confidence level, meaning that one out of 20 bad hypotheses might pass. Machine-learning and data science tools can allow us to generate hypotheses that will run the risk of publishing results not grounded in truth. Medical researchers, particularly those trying to tackle diseases such as cancer, often hit upon hard algorithmic barriers. Biological systems are incredibly complex structures. We know that our DNA forms a code that describes how our bodies are formed and the functions they perform, but we have only a very limited understanding on how these processes work.
On November 30, 2020, Google’s DeepMind announced AlphaFold, a new algorithm that predicts the shape of a protein based on its amino acid sequence.22 AlphaFold’s predictions nearly reach the accuracy of experimentally building the amino acid sequence and measuring the shape of the protein that forms. There is some controversy as to whether DeepMind has actually “solved” protein folding and it is far too early to gauge its impact, but in the long run this could give us a new digital tool to study proteins, understand how they interact, and learn how to design them to fight disease.
Beyond P vs. NP: chess and go. NP is like solving a puzzle. Sudoku, on an arbitrarily sized board, is NP-complete to solve from a given initial setting of numbers in some of the squares. But what about games with two players who take alternate turns, such as chess and go, when we ask about who wins from a given initial setting of the pieces? Even if we have P = NP, it wouldn’t necessarily give us a perfect chess program. You would have to ask if there is a move for white such that for every move of black, there is a move for white such that for every move of black … white wins. You just can’t do all those alternations of white and black on P = NP alone. Games like these tend to be wha is called PSPACE-hard, hard for computation that uses a reasonable amount of memory without any limit on time. Chess and go could even be harder depending on the precise formulation of the rules (see Demaine and Hearn.11)
This doesn’t mean you can’t get a good chess program if P = NP. You could find an efficient computer program of one size that beats all efficient programs of slightly smaller sizes, if that’s possible. Meanwhile, even without P = NP, computers have gotten very strong at chess and go. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, chess world champion at the time, but go programs struggled against even strong amateurs. Machine learning has made dramatic improvements to computer game playing. While there is a lengthy history, let me jump to AlphaZero, developed in 2017 by Google’s DeepMind.35
AlphaZero uses a technique known as Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) that randomly makes moves for both players to determine the best course of action. AlphaZero uses deep learning to predict the best distributions for the game positions to optimize the chances to win using MCTS. While AlphaZero is not the first program to use MCTS, it does not have any built-in strategy or access to a previous game database. AlphaZero assumes nothing more than the rules of the game. This allows AlphaZero to excel at both chess and go, two very different games that share little other than alternating moves and a fixed-size board. DeepMind recently went even further with MuZero,33 which doesn’t even get the full rules, just some representation of board position, a list of legal moves, and whether the position is a win, lose, or draw. Now we’ve come to the point that pure machine learning easily beats any human or other algorithm in chess or go. Human intervention only gets in the way. For games such as chess and go, machine learning can achieve success where P = NP wouldn’t be enough.
Machine learning may not do well when faced with tasks that are not from the distribution in which it was trained.
Explainable AI. Many machine-learning algorithms seem to work very well but we don’t know why. If you look at a neural net trained for voice recognition, it’s often very hard to understand why it makes the choices it makes. Why should we care? Here are a few of several reasons.
Trust: How do we know that the neural net is acting correctly? Beyond checking input/output pairs we can’t do any other analysis. Different applications have different levels of trust. It’s okay if Netflix makes a bad movie recommendation, but less so if a self-driving car recommends a wrong turn.
Fairness@: Many examples abound in which algorithms trained on data learn the intended and unintended biases in that data (see O’Neil30). If you don’t understand the program, how do you figure out the biases?
Security: If you use machine learning to monitor security systems, you won’t know what exploits still exist, especially if your adversary is being adaptive. If you can understand the code, you could spot and fix security leaks. Of course, if adversaries have the code, they might find exploits.
Cause and effect: Right now, you can, at best, check that a machine-learning algorithm only correlates with the kind of output you desire. Understanding the code might help us understand the causality in the data, leading to better science and medicine.
Would we get a better scenario if P = NP? If you had a quick algorithm for NP-complete problems, you could use it to find the smallest possible circuit for matching or Traveling Salesman, but you would not know why that circuit works. On the other hand, the reason you might want an explainable algorithm is so you can understand its properties, but we could use P = NP to derive those properties directly. Whole conferences have cropped up studying explainable AI, such as the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Trust.
Limits of machine learning. While machine learning has shown many surprising results in the last decade, these systems are far from perfect and, in most applications, can still be bested by humans. We will continue to improve machine-learning capability through new and optimized algorithms, data collection, and specialized hardware. Machine learning does seem to have its limits. As we’ve seen above, machine learning will give us a taste of P = NP, but it will never substitute for it. Machine learning makes little progress on breaking cryptography, which we will see later in the article.
Machine learning seems to fail learning simple arithmetic—for example, summing up a large collection of numbers or multiplying large numbers. One could imagine combining machine learning with symbolic mathematical tools. While we’ve seen some impressive advances in theorem provers,19 we sit a long way from my dream task of taking one of my research papers, with its informal proofs, and having an AI system fill in the details and verify the proof.
Again, P = NP would make these tasks easy or at least tractable. Machine learning may not do well when faced with tasks that are not from the distribution in which it was trained. That could be low-probability edge cases, such as face recognition from a race not well represented in the training data, or even an adversarial attempt to force a different output by making a small change in the input—for example, changing a few pixels of a stop sign to force an algorithm to interpret it as a speed limit sign.12 Deep neural-net algorithms can have millions of parameters, so they may not generalize well off distribution. If P = NP, one can produce minimum-sized models that would hopefully do a better job of generalizing, but without the experiment we can’t perform, we will never know.
As impressive as machine learning is, we have not achieved anything close to artificial general intelligence, a term that refer to something like true comprehension of a topic or to an artificial system that achieves true consciousness or self-awareness. Defining these terms can be tricky, controversial, or even impossible. Personally, I’ve never seen a formal definition of consciousness that captures my intuitive notion of the concept. I suspect we will never achieve artificial general intelligence in the strong sense, even if P = NP.
Back to Top
Cryptography
While we have seen much progress in attacking NP problems, cryptography in its many forms, including one-way functions, secure hashes, and public-key cryptography, seems to have survived intact. An efficient algorithm for NP, were it to exist, would break all cryptosystems save those that are information-theoretically safe, such as one-time pads and some based on quantum physics. We have seen many successful cybersecurity attacks, but usually they stem from bad implementations, weak random number generators, or human error, but rarely if ever from breaking the cryptography.
Most CPU chips now have AES built in, so once we’ve used public-key cryptography to set up a private key, we can send encrypted data as easily as plain text. Encryption powers blockchain and cryptocurrencies, meaning people trust cryptography enough to exchange money for bits. Michael Kearns and Leslie Valiant24 showed in 1994 that learning the smallest circuit, even learning the smallest bounded-layer neural net, could be used to factor numbers and break public-key crypto-systems. So far, machine-learning algorithms have not been successfully used to break cryptographic protocols nor are they ever expected to.
I suspect we will never achieve artificial general intelligence in the strong sense, even if P = NP.
Why does encryption do so well when we’ve made progress on many other NP problems? In cryptography, we can choose the problem, specifically designed to be hard to compute and well tested by the community. Other NP problems generally come to us from applications or nature. They tend to not be the hardest cases and are more amenable to current technologies.
Quantum computing seems to threaten current public-key protocols that secure our Internet transactions. Shor’s algorithm34 can factor numbers and other related number-theory computations. This concern can be tempered in a few ways. Despite some impressive advances in quantum computing, we are still decades if not centuries away from developing quantum machines that can handle enough entangled bits to implement Shor’s algorithm on a scale that can break today’s codes. Also, researchers have made good progress toward developing public-key cryptosystems that appear resistant to quantum attacks.31 We will dwell more on quantum computing later in this article.
Factoring is not known to be NP-complete, and it is certainly possible that a mathematical breakthrough could lead to efficient algorithms even if we don’t have large-scale quantum computers. Having multiple approaches to public-key systems may come in handy no matter your view of quantum’s future.
Back to Top
Complexity as Friction
What advantages can we get from computational hardness? Cryptography comes to mind. But perhaps the universe made computation difficult for a reason, not unlike friction. In the physical world, overcoming friction usually comes at the cost of energy, but we can’t walk without it. In the computational world, complexity can often slow progress, but if it didn’t exist, we could have many other problems. P = NP would allow us to, in many cases, eliminate this friction.
Recent advances in computing show us that eliminating friction can sometimes have negative consequences. For instance, no one can read our minds, only see the actions that we take. Economists have a term, “preference revelation,” which attempts to determine our desires based on our actions. For most of history, the lack of data and computing power made this at best a highly imprecise art.
Today, we’ve collected a considerable amount of information about people from their web searches, their photos and videos, the purchases they make, the places they visit (virtual and real), their social media activity, and much more. Moreover, machine learning can process this information and make eerily accurate predictions about people’s behavior. Computers often know more about us than we know about ourselves.
We have the technological capability to wear glasses that would allow you to learn the name, interests and hobbies, and even the political persuasion of the person you are looking at. Complexity no longer affords us privacy. We need to preserve privacy with laws and corporate responsibility.
Computational friction can go beyond privacy. The U.S. government deregulated airline pricing in 1978 but finding the best price for a route required making phone calls to several airlines or working through a travel agent, who wasn’t always incentivized to find the lowest price. Airlines worked on reputation, some for great service and others for lower prices. Today, we can easily find the cheapest airline flights, so airlines have put considerable effort into competing on this single dimension of price and have used computation to optimize pricing and fill their planes, at the expense of the whole flying experience.
Friction helped clamp down on cheating by students. Calculus questions I had to answer as a college student in the 1980s can now be tackled easy by Mathematica. For my introductory theory courses, I have trouble creating homework and exam questions whose answers and solutions cannot be found online. With GPT-3 and its successors, even essay and coding questions can be automatically generated. How do we motivate students when GPT and the like can answer even their most complex questions?
Stock trading used to happen in big pits, where traders used hand signals to match prices. Now, trading algorithms automatically adjust to new pricing, occasionally leading to “flash crashes.” Machine-learning techniques have led to decision-making systems or face recognition, matching social media content to users and judicial sentencing often at scale. These decision systems have done some good but have also led to significant challenges, such as amplifying biases and political polarization.30 There are no easy answers here.
These are just a few of many such possible scenarios. Our goal, as computer scientists, is to make computation as efficient and simple as possible, but we must keep the costs of reducing friction on our minds.
Back to Top
The Power of Quantum Computers
As the limits of Moore’s law have become more apparent, computer researchers have looked toward non-traditional computation models to make the next breakthroughs, leading to large growth in the research and application of quantum computing. Major tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM—not to mention a raft of startups—have thrown considerable resources at developing quantum computers. The U.S. has launched a National Quantum Initiative and other countries, notably China, have followed suit.
In 2019, Google announced1 it used a quantum computer with 53 qubits to achieve “quantum supremacy,” solving a computational task that current traditional computation cannot. While some have questioned this claim, we certainly sit at the precipice of a new era in quantum computing. Nevertheless, we remain far away from having the tens of thousands of quantum bits required to run Peter Shor’s algorithm34 to find prime factors of numbers that today’s machines cannot factor. Often, quantum computing gets described as the number of states represented by the bits—for example, the 253 states of a 53-qubit machine. This might suggest that we could use quantum computing to solve NP-complete problems by creating enough states to, for instance, check all the potential cliques in a graph. Unfortunately, there are limits to how a quantum algorithm can manipulate these states, and all evidence suggests that quantum computers cannot solve NP-complete problems,3 beyond a quadratic improvement given by Grover’s algorithm.18
Back to Top
Complexity Updates
Since the 2009 survey, we have seen several major advances in our understanding of the power of efficient computation. While these results do not make significant progress toward resolving P vs. NP, they still show how it continues to inspire great research.
Graph isomorphism. Some NP problems resist characterization as either in P (efficiently solvable) or NP-complete (as hard as the Clique problem). The most famous, integer factoring, which we discussed previously, still requires exponential time to solve. For another such problem, graph isomorphism, we have recently seen dramatic progress. Graph isomorphism asks whether two graphs are identical up to relabeling. Thinking in terms of Facebook, given two groups of 1,000 people, can we map names from one group onto the other in a way that preserves friendships?
Results related to interactive proofs in the 1980s offered strong evidence that graph isomorphism is not NP-complete,4 and even simple heuristics can generally solve such problems quickly in practice. Nevertheless, we still lack a polynomial-time algorithm for graph isomorphism that works in all instances. László Babai achieved a breakthrough result in 2016, presenting a quasipolynomial-time algorithm for graph isomorphism.2 The problems in P run in polynomial-time—that is, nk for some constant k, where n is the size of the input, such as the number of people in each group. A quasipolynomial-time algorithm runs in time n(logn)k, a bit worse than polynomial time but considerably better than the exponential time (2nε) that we expect NP-complete problems will need.
Babai’s proof is a tour-de-force masterpiece combining combinatorics and group theory. Although getting the algorithm to run in polynomial-time would require several new breakthroughs, Babai provides a major theoretical result, making dramatic progress on one of the most important problems between P and NP-complete.
Circuits. If NP does not have small circuits over a complete basis (AND, OR, NOT) then P ≠ NP. While there were significant circuit complexity results in the 1980s, none get close to showing P ≠ NP. The 2009 survey remarked that there were no major results in circuit complexity in the 20 years prior. That lasted about one more year. In 1987, Razborov32 and Smolensky36 showed the impossibility of computing the majority function with constant-depth circuits of AND, OR, NOT, and Modp gates for some fixed prime p. We could prove little, though, for circuits with Mod6 gates. Even showing that NEXP, an exponential-time version of NP, could not be computed by small, constant-depth circuits of AND, OR, NOT, and Mod6 gates remained open for decades. Constant-depth circuits are believed to be computationally weak. The lack of results reflects the paltry progress we have had in showing the limits of computation models.
In 2010, Ryan Williams showed39 that NEXP indeed didn’t have such small constant-depth circuits with Mod6 or any other Mod gate. He had created a new technique, applying satisfiability algorithms that do just slightly better than trying all assignments and drawing in several complexity tools to achieve the lower bounds. Later, Williams and his student Cody Murray strengthened29 the result to show that nondeterministic quasipolynomial-time doesn’t have small constant-depth circuits with Modm gates for any fixed m. Nevertheless, showing that NP does not have small circuits of arbitrary depth—which is what you would need to show P ≠ NP—remains far out of reach.
All evidence suggests that quantum computers cannot solve NP-complete problems, beyond a quadratic improvement given by Grover’s algorithm.
Complexity strikes back? In a section of the 2009 survey titled, “A New Hope?”13 we discussed a new geometric-complexity-theory approach to attacking P vs. NP based on algebraic geometry and representation theory developed by Ketan Mulmuley and Milind Sohoni. In short, Mulmuley and Sohoni sought to create high-dimension polygons capturing the power of a problem in an algebraic version of NP and show that it had different properties than any such polygon corresponding to an algebraic property of P. One of their conjectures considered the property that the polygons contained a certain representation-theoretic object. In 2016, Peter Bürgisser, Christian Ikenmeyer, and Greta Panova6 showed that this approach cannot succeed.
While the Bürgisser-Ikenmeyer-Panova result deals a blow to the GCT approach to separating P vs. NP, it does not count it out. One could still potentially create polygons that differ based on the number of these representation-theoretic objects. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t expect the GCT approach to settle the P vs. NP problem anytime in the near future.
Back to Top
The Possibility of the Impossible
As we reflect on P vs. NP, we see the question having many different meanings. There is P vs. NP the mathematical question—formally defined, stubbornly open, and still with a million-dollar bounty on its head. There were times when we could see a way forward toward settling P vs. NP through tools of computability theory, circuits, proofs, and algebraic geometry. At the moment, we don’t have a strong way forward to solving the P vs. NP problem. In some sense, we are further from solving it than we ever were.
There are also the NP problems we just want or need to solve. In the classic 1976 text, Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness,16 Garey and Johnson give an example of a hapless employee asked to solve an NP-complete optimization problem. Ultimately, the employee goes to the boss and says, “I can’t find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people,” indicating that the boss shouldn’t fire the employee since no other hire could solve the problem.
In those early days of P vs. NP, we saw NP-completeness as a barrier—these were problems that we just couldn’t solve. As computers and algorithms evolved, we found we could make progress on many NP problems through a combination of heuristics, approximation, and brute-force computing. In the Garey and Johnson story, if I were the boss, I might not fire the employee but advise trying mixed-integer programming, machine learning, or a brute-force search. We are well past the time that NP-complete means impossible. It just means there is likely no algorithm that will always work and scale.
In my 2013 book on P vs. NP,14 I have a chapter titled, “A Beautiful World,” where I imagine an idealized world in which a Czech mathematician proves P = NP, leading to a very efficient algorithm for all NP problems. While we do not and likely will not ever live in this ideal world—with medical advances, virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality, and learning algorithms that generate new works of art—the wonderful (and not so wonderful) consequences of P = NP no longer seem out of reach, but rather an eventual consequence of our further advances in computing.
We are truly on our way to nearly completely reversing the meaning of the P vs. NP problems. Instead of representing a barrier, think of P vs. NP opening doors, presenting us with new directions, and showing us the possibility of the impossible.
Back to Top
Acknowledgments | |||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 5 | https://nanoexplanations.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/a-mathematical-proof-of-the-church-turing-thesis/ | en | A mathematical proof of the Church-Turing Thesis? | http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb_editors-selection.png | http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb_editors-selection.png | [
"https://i0.wp.com/www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb_editors-selection.png",
"https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/2408601e9753c798ea623d55655959ac87c73b4c011d3f60a83e50785e147b62?s=48&d=identicon&r=PG",
"https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/a992462f7546f957134c9df1e05040acaba333f429c10f995048a889e93f820f?s=4... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2011-07-04T00:00:00 | The Church-Turing Thesis lies at the junction between computer science, mathematics, physics and philosophy. The Thesis essentially states that everything computable in the "real world" is exactly what is computable within our accepted mathematical abstractions of computation, such as Turing machines. This is a strong statement, and, of course, if one had tried to say the… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Nanoexplanations | https://nanoexplanations.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/a-mathematical-proof-of-the-church-turing-thesis/ | The Church-Turing Thesis lies at the junction between computer science, mathematics, physics and philosophy. The Thesis essentially states that everything computable in the “real world” is exactly what is computable within our accepted mathematical abstractions of computation, such as Turing machines. This is a strong statement, and, of course, if one had tried to say the same thing about natural laws and Newtonian physics, one would have a respectable thesis that turned out to be false. (There is even a theoretical research area, hypercomputation, that attempts to show how “super-Turing” computers could be built in real life by taking advantage on non-Newtonian physics.)
When I learned the Church-Turing Thesis in school, I was told that it was a thesis, not a theorem, precisely because it was not formally provable. The notion of “computable” was intuitive, not mathematically precise, so it was impossible to say whether a particular mathematical abstraction was the ULTIMATELY CORRECT one. Nevertheless, in 2008, two respected researchers — Nachum Dershowitz of Tel Aviv University, and Yuri Gurevich of Microsoft Research — did indeed publish a proof of the Church-Turing Thesis in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. How is this possible? They constructed an axiomatization of computation based on abstract state machines, a theoretical notion developed by Gurevich that Microsoft has used to perform practical software tests, and then proved that the Church-Turing Thesis held for that axiomatization of computation. In other words, they managed to formalize the notoriously unformalizable “computation in the real world.”
This impressed me quite a bit — so much so, that when a user named Avinash asked on the theoretical computer science question and answer site, “What would it mean to disprove Church-Turing Thesis?” I answered that the Thesis had been proved for all practical purposes. Not my finest hour, as we will see. Fortunately, Avinash, in a feat of crowdsourcing genius, accepted my answer as correct, in order to encourage discussion. Since then, some of the top theorists in the world have contributed their opinion of the Dershowitz/Gurevich paper, and their philosophy about the thesis overall. I will cover some of the main points in the rest of this blog entry.
First off, the Wikipedia definition of the Church-Turing Thesis is:
Every effectively calculable function is a computable function.
Here, “effectively calculable” means intuitively computable, by rote, in real life; and “computable” means formally computable according to some mathematically defined notion of computation. The history leading up to the formulation of the Thesis is fascinating, and not without controversy. Dershowitz and Gurevich believe, in fact, that Church and Turing put forth two separate Theses, while the computability theorist Robert Soare believes the Thesis should be named simply, “Turing’s Thesis.” I won’t go into any of this here, but for further information, you can look at a video of a presentation Gurevich gave in 2009, or read Computability and Recursion by Soare.
The informal axiomatization of computation provided by Dershowitz and Gurevich is as follows.
I. An algorithm determines a sequence of “computational” states for each input.
II. The states of a computational sequence are structures. And everything is invariant under isomorphism.
III. The transitions from state to state in computational sequences are governable by some fixed, finite description.
IV. Only undeniably computable operations are available in initial states.
Dershowitz and Gurevich formalize these axioms using abstract state machines, and proceed to derive from those axioms the statements they call Church’s Thesis and Turing’s Thesis. Pretty cool. But… what is wrong with this picture? I will quote from the comments and answers generated by Avinash’s question, and my own answer to it.
As normally understood, the Church-Turing thesis is not a formal proposition that can be proved. It is a scientific hypothesis, so it can be “disproved” in the sense that it is falsifiable. Any “proof” must provide a definition of computability with it, and the proof is only as good as that definition. I’m sure Dershowitz-Gurevich have a fine proof, but the real issue is whether the definition really covers everything computable. Answering “can it be disproved?” by saying “it’s been proved” is misleading. It has been proved under a reasonable (falsifiable!) definition of computability. — Ryan Williams
The Dershowitz-Gurevich paper says nothing about probabilistic or quantum computation. It does write down a set of axioms about computation, and prove the Church-Turing thesis assuming those axioms. However, we’re left with justifying these axioms. Neither probabilistic nor quantum computation is covered by these axioms (they admit this for probabilistic computation, and do not mention quantum computation at all), so it’s quite clear to me these axioms are actually false in the real world, even though the Church-Turing thesis is probably true. — Peter Shor
Peter Shor is, of course, a Godel Prize winner for designing the “quantum factoring algorithm” among many other impressive accomplishments; Ryan Williams is on the short list for a future Godel Prize, because of a major breakthrough he recently achieved in the field of circuit complexity.
Other heavy hitters weighed in on the subject as well. Gil Kalai provided several pointers to papers discussing variants of the Church-Turing Thesis, and some thoughts of his own. Andrej Bauer said he thought it was impossible to prove the thesis, but it might be disproved by designing a real-world computational device that was able to compute a function that Turing machines provably could not compute. Timothy Chow responded to that by saying it brought up a philosophical problem: how could we know that the real-world device was actually performing that super-Turing computation? It’s a fascinating conversation, that is still ongoing. I doubt the Dershowitz/Gurevich paper is the last word. | ||
2453 | dbpedia | 3 | 94 | https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/abstract.html | en | Previous Abstracts | [
"https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/pizza.gif",
"https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/cat.jpg"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | May 1, 2009
Speaker: Philip Matchett Wood
Title: Stacks of Blocks and a Variety of Stacking Schemes
Abstract: Say you have n wooden blocks and a table. Can you stack up the blocks so that one block is suspended over the edge of the table; that is, can you stack the blocks so that one particular block is supported by other blocks, but no part of the table is directly below the particular block?
Though seemingly simple, this question has inspired some very interesting mathematics that combines basic physics, combinatorics, and computer science. This talk will focus on concrete examples, and will discuss some classical results and also recent work by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick and by Paterson, Peres, Thorup, Winkler, and Zwick.
The block stacking problem is an age-old question that is sometimes called the book-stacking problem, and it also works quite well with a deck of cards (as pointed out by Ron Graham at the 2009 Joint Mathematics Meetings). Speaking of which, it would be great if some of you could bring along decks of cards to stack with. Also, Jay---can we have this talk in a room with desks? I conducted a thought experiment involving stacking slices of pizza on the edge of a paper plate I was holding in my mind, and, well, let's just say the carpet in my thought experiment may never be quite the same.
Hope to see you there!
P.S. I have been told that "stack", "variety", and even "scheme" are remarkable and sometimes hard to understand concepts in algebraic geometry (if you don't believe me, check out the top google hit for stack variety scheme ). As far as I can tell, these are totally unrelated to stacking blocks.
October 31, 2008
Speaker: Vidit Nanda
Title: Buffon's Needle Problem
Abstract: It is a fine winter morning in Paris. Le Comte de Buffon, nursing a level-7 hangover from various cognac-related excesses of the night before, screams angrily at the help who have bungled his breakfast again. As the veal (medium rare) and the wine (Merlot, bien entendu) sink in, he rummons the strength to stand and ponder the following:
"Suppose that you drop a short needle on ruled paper - what is then the probability that the needle comes to lie in a position where it crosses one of the lines? "
We will solve Buffon's Needle Problem twice. Once in the standard way, and once with the cute - yet insightful - trick of Barbier from 1860. The answer provides a way for anyone with the simple luxuries of 1) a needle, 2) a sheet of ruled paper, and 3) infinite time to estimate Pi accurately.
April 25, 2008
Speaker: Eduardo Osorio
Title: Untitled
Abstract: Hi Pizza seminar attendees. This Friday I will give a very basic talk on a small Financial Math result that has popped up in way too many get togethers with friends and I have been never able to explain it satisfactorily. We'll see if I can do it this time.
A call option is a financial contract between two parties, the buyer and the seller. The buyer (or holder) of the option has the right, but not the obligation to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial instrument (the underlying instrument) from the seller at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (the strike price). The seller is obligated to sell the commodity or financial instrument should the buyer decides to exercise such an option.
A European call option allows the holder to exercise the option only on the agreed expiration date. An American call option allows exercise at any time during the life of the option. Because of this early exercise feature, the american call option on a stock (say a Google stock) is at least as valuable as its European counterpart. Well, it turns out that in the case that the stock price follows the dynamics of a Geometric Brownian Motion (a model widely used) the early exercise feature for a call on a stock (paying no dividends) is worthless. I will attempt to introduce (very) shortly and roughly how to price these options, and then I will show that their price is the same.
February 29, 2008
Speaker: Eric Rowland
Title: The Crazy Thue-Morse Sequence
Abstract: Since this talk falls on February 29th, I decided that I should choose a subject matter that is equally unusual and mysterious. So I will talk about the Thue-Morse sequence -- a sequence of 0s and 1s with a very regular but nonperiodic structure. It begins
0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 ... .
We'll see this sequence cropping up in infinitely long games of chess, strange iterated products, multigrades (sets of integers for which $\sum_{a \in A} a^i = \sum_{b \in B} b^i$ holds for several different values of $i$), and alfalfa. I'll also talk about the class of automatic sequences (of which Thue-Morse is the first example) and a generalization to infinite alphabets (namely the integers).
April 20, 2007
Speaker: John Bryk
Title: In Which John Bryk Proves Something Neat about Transcendental Numbers
Abstract:
In the mid-1930's, Gelfond and Schneider independently proved that if a and b are algebraic numbers, then a^b is transcendental (excluding the trivial cases a = 0, 1 or b rational). I had never bothered to look up the proof myself, partly because transcendental number theory isn't my cup of tea, and partly because I imagined the proof to be quite hard. Although the former is still true, I recently found out that the latter isn't.
In this talk, I will discuss transcendental numbers. The main result I will prove roughly states that if f and g are well-behaved analytic functions algebraically independent over the rationals, then f(z) and g(z) are both algebraic for only finitely many z. The proof uses little more than linear algebra and the maximum modulus principle. Immediate consequences of the theorem include the Gelfond-Schneider Theorem as well as the classical facts that e and pi are transcendental.
April 21, 2006
Speaker: Philip Matchett Wood
Title: The Pentagon Game
Abstract: This talk is based on the work of Richard Schwartz, and named for his two daughters Lucy and Lily.
Suppose you have a regular pentagon in the plane that is centered at the origin. Suppose also that this pentagon may be moved around in the plane by being reflected over a line containing one of its edges. So you always have five possible moves that can be made.
Now, suppose that one night while you are sleeping someone _else_ makes 50 random moves of your pentagon. When you wake up, how long will it take you to move the pentagon back to being centered at the origin?
Just to give an idea that moving the pentagon back to the origin might not be easy, note that using the edge reflection moves, the positions of the center of the pentagon are dense in the plane. So, for example, when you wake up,you might find that the origin is _inside_ your pentagon, but the pentagon is_still_ not centered.
Want to find out more? Come to pizza seminar!!
March 3, 2006
Speaker: Eduardo Osorio
Title: Stochastic Approach to Deterministic Boundary Value Problems
Abstract: Pdf of Abstract here
NOTE: the abstract printed below does not render properly in HTML, but the above pdf _will_.
Let's recall the most celebrated boundary value problem:
Given a (nice) domain Ãâàin $R^n$ and a continuous function g on the boundary of ÃâÃÂ, @ÃâÃÂ, find a function u continuous on the closure Ãâàof Ãâàsuch that
(i) u = g on @ÃâÃÂ
(ii) u is harmonic in ÃâÃÂ, i.e, Ãââu := n Xi=1 @2u @x2 i = 0 in ÃâÃÂ:
In 1944 Kakutani proved that the solution could be expressed in terms of Brownian motion: u(x) is the expected value of g at the first exit point from U of the Brownian motion starting at x 2 U.
It turned out that this was just the tip of an iceberg: For a large class of semielliptic second order partial differential equations the corresponding Dirichlet boundary value problem can be solved using a stochastic process which is a solution of an associated stochastic differential equation (and viceversa). In this talk we won’t go that far, but we should have enough time to eat some pizza and discuss what Kakutani proved...
February 10, 2006
Speaker: Prof R. Falk & Prof G. Cherlin
Title:Two Faculty Glimpses
Abstract (from Prof Cherlin):
Model theory deals with very general algebraic systems, but frequently leads back to algebraic geometry and specifically to algebraic groups. I aim to indicate why that is. Part of the explanation is conjectural.
Abstract (from Prof Falk):
Title: Approximation of Partial Differential Equations by the Finite Element Method:
The finite element method is one of the major advances in numerical computing of the past century. It has become an indispensable tool for simulation of a wide variety of phenomena arising in science and engineering. A tremendous asset of finite elements is that they not only provide a methodology to develop numerical algorithms for simulation, but also a theoretical framework in which to assess the accuracy of the computed solutions.
This talk introduces the basic ideas of approximation of partial differential equations by the finite element method. These include variational formulations of boundary value problems (on which the finite element method is based), the construction and approximation properties of finite element (i.e, piecewise polynomial) spaces, and a discussion of rigorous error estimates for such approximation schemes. | ||||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 2 | 37 | https://playback.fm/person/peter-shor | en | Spouse, Children, Birthday & More | https://playback.fm/share-image?text=Peter Shor | https://playback.fm/share-image?text=Peter Shor | [
"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Peter_Shor.jpg?width=300",
"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/NYC%20Downtown%20Manhattan%20Skyline%20seen%20from%20Paulus%20Hook%202019-12-20%20IMG%207347%20FRD%20%28cropped%29.jpg?width=64",
"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FileP... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Find out where Peter Shor was born, their birthday and details about their professions, education, religion, family and other life details and facts. | en | Playback.fm | https://playback.fm/person/peter-shor | Fame Ranking
What does "Most Famous" mean? Unlike other sites which use current mentions, follower counts, etc. that tend to call the most famous people YouTube stars or Reality TV stars, we've decided to mark fame as a persons importance in history. We've conducted research scouring millions of historical references to determine the importance of people in History. That being said, we might have missed a few people here and there. The ranking system is a continuing work in progress - if you happen to feel like someone is misranked or missing, please shoot us a message!
Fame Ranking
What does "Most Famous" mean? Unlike other sites which use current mentions, follower counts, etc. that tend to call the most famous people YouTube stars or Reality TV stars, we've decided to mark fame as a persons importance in history. We've conducted research scouring millions of historical references to determine the importance of people in History. That being said, we might have missed a few people here and there. The ranking system is a continuing work in progress - if you happen to feel like someone is misranked or missing, please shoot us a message! | |||
2453 | dbpedia | 3 | 82 | https://bookauthority.org/books/best-selling-computability-books | en | 20 Best-Selling Computability Books of All Time | [] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | A list of the best-selling computability books of all time, such as Godel's Proof and Computability. | en | /images/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png?v=almeA543QQ | BookAuthority | https://bookauthority.org/books/best-selling-computability-books | |||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 23 | http://dmatheorynet.blogspot.com/2010/09/2011-godel-prize-call-for-nominations.html | en | Theory Announcements: 2011 Gödel Prize: Call for Nominations | http://dmatheorynet.blogspot.com/favicon.ico | http://dmatheorynet.blogspot.com/favicon.ico | [
"https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif",
"https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif",
"https://resources.blogblog.com/img/widgets/arrow_dropdown.gif",
"https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon_feed12.png",
"https://resources.blogblog.com/img/widgets/subscribe-netvibes.png",
"h... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theo... | http://dmatheorynet.blogspot.com/favicon.ico | http://dmatheorynet.blogspot.com/2010/09/2011-godel-prize-call-for-nominations.html | The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM-SIGACT). The award is presented annually, with the presentation taking place alternately at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) and the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). The nineteenth prize will be awarded at the 43rd ACM symposium on the Theory of Computingto be held as part of FCRC in San Jose, California, in June 2011. The Prize is named in honor of Kurt Gödel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic and of his interest, discovered in a letter he wrote to John von Neumann shortly before von Neumann’s death, in what has become the famous “P versus NP” question. The Prize includes an award of USD 5000.
AWARD COMMITTEE : The winner of the Prize is selected by a committee of six members. The EATCS President and the SIGACT Chair each appoint three members to the committee, to serve staggered three-year terms. The committee is chaired alternately by representatives of EATCS and SIGACT. The 2011 Award Committee consists of Sanjeev Arora (Princeton), Josep Diaz (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Cynthia Dwork (Microsoft Research), Mogens Nielsen (University of Aarhus), Mike Paterson (University of Warwick) and Eli Upfal (Brown University).
ELIGIBILITY : The last change of rules goes back to the 2005 Prize. The (parametric) rule can be found on websites of both SIGACT and EATCS. The rule for the 2011 Prize is given below and supersedes any different interpretation of the parametric rule. Any research paper or series of papers by a single author or by a team of authors is deemed eligible if
(i)the paper was published in a recognized refereed journal no later than December 10, 2010;
(ii)the main results were not published (in either preliminary or final form) in a journal or conference proceedings before January 1st, 1998.
The research work nominated for the award should be in the area of theoretical computer science. The term “theoretical computer science” is meant to encompass, but is not restricted to, those areas covered by ICALP and STOC. Nominations are encouraged from the broadest spectrum of the theoretical computer science community so as to ensure that potential award winning papers are not overlooked. The Award Committee shall have the ultimate authority to decide whether a particular paper is eligible for the Prize.
NOMINATIONS : Nominations for the award should be submitted by email to the Award Committee Chair : Eli Upfal eli@cs.brown.edu . To be considered, nominations for the 2011 Prize must be received by December 10, 2010. Nominations may be made by any member of the scientific community. It is the duty of the Award Committee to actively solicit nominations. A nomination should contain a brief summary of the technical content of the paper(s) and a brief explanation of its significance. A printable copy of the research paper or papers should accompany the nomination. The nomination must state the date and venue of the first conference or workshop publication or state that no such publication has occurred. The work may be in any language. However, if it is not in English, a more extended summary written in English should be enclosed. Additional recommendations in favor of the nominated work may also be enclosed. To be considered for the award, the paper or series of papers must be recommended by at least two individuals, either in the form of two distinct nominations or one nomination including recommendations from two different people. Those intending to submit a nomination are encouraged to contact the Award Committee Chair by email well in advance. The Award Committee will accept informal proposals of potential nominees, as well as tentative offers to prepare formal nominations. The “Subject” line of all related messages should begin with
“Gödel 2011”.
SELECTION PROCESS: Although the Award Committee is encouraged to consult with the theoretical computer science community at large, the Award Committee is solely responsible for the selection of the winner of the award. The Prize may be shared by more than one paper or series of papers, and the Award Committee reserves the right to declare no winner at all. All matters relating to the selection process that are not specified here are left to the discretion of the Award Committee.
PAST WINNERS:
2010: S. Arora. Polynomial-time approximation schemes for Euclidean TSP and other geometric problems, Journal ACM 45(5), (1998), 753-782. J.S.B. Mitchell. Guillotine subdivisions approximate polygonal subdivisions: A simple polynomial-time approximation scheme for geometric TSP, k-MST, and related problems, SIAM J. Computing 28(4), (1999), 1298-1309.
2009: Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan, and Avi Wigderson, “Entropywaves, the zig-zag graph product, and new constant-degree expanders”, Annals of Mathematics, 155 (2002), 157–187.
Omer Reingold, “Undirected connectivity in log-space”, Journal of the ACM 55
(2008), 1–24.
2008: Daniel A. Spielman and Shang-Hua Teng, “Smoothed analysis of algorithms : Why the simplex algorithm usually takes polynomial time”, Journal of the ACM, 51 (2004), 385–463.
2007: Alexander A. Razborov and Steven Rudich, “Natural Proofs”, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 55 (1997), 24–35.
2006: Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena, “PRIMES is in P”, Annals of
Mathematics, 160 (2004), 1–13.
2005: Noga Alon, Yossi Matias and Mario Szegedy, “The space complexity of approximating
the frequency moments”, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 58 (1999), 137– 147.
2004: Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, “The Topological Structure of Asynchronous Computation”, Journal of the ACM, 46 (1999), 858–923.
Michael Saks and Fotios Zaharoglou, “Wait-Free k-Set Agreement Is Impossible :
The Topology of Public Knowledge”, SIAM Journal of Computing, 29 (2000), 1449–1483.
2003: Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire, “A Decision Theoretic Generalization of On-Line Learning and an Application to Boosting”, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 55 (1997), 119–139.
2002: Géraud Sénizergues, “L(A)=L(B) ? Decidaility results from complete formal systems”, Theoretical Computer Science 251 (2001), 1–166.
2001: Uriel Feige, Shafi Goldwasser, László Lovász, Shmuel Safra, and Mario Szegedy, “Interactive proofs and the hardness of approximating cliques”, Journal of the ACM 43 (1996), 268–292.
Sanjeev Arora and Shmuel Safra, “Probabilistic checking of proofs : a new characterization of NP”, Journal of the ACM 45 (1998), 70–122.
Sanjeev Arora, Carsten Lund, Rajeev Motwani, Madhu Sudan, and Mario Szegedy,
“Proof verification and the hardness of approximation problems”, Journal of the ACM 45 (1998), 501–555.
2000: Moshe Y. Vardi and Pierre Wolper, “Reasoning about infinite computations”, Information and Computation 115 (1994), 1–37.
1999: Peter W. Shor, “Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer”, SIAM Journal on Computing 26 (1997), 1484–1509.
1998: Seinosuke Toda, “PP is as hard as the polynomial-time hierarchy”, SIAM Journal on Computing 20 (1991), 865–877.
1997: Joseph Halpern and Yoram Moses, “Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment”, Journal of the ACM 37 (1990), 549–587.
1996: Alistair Sinclair and Mark Jerrum, “Approximate counting unform generation and rapidly mixing Markov chains”, Information and Computation 82 (1989), 93–133.
Mark Jerrum and Alistair Sinclair, “Approximating the permanent”, SIAM Journal
on Computing 18 (1989), 1149–1178.
1995: Neil Immerman, “Nondeterministic space is closed under complementation”, SIAM Journal on Computing 17 (1988), 935–938.
Róbert Szelepcsényi, “The method of forced enumeration for nondeterministic automata”, Acta Informatica 26 (1988), 279–284.
1994: Johan Håstad, “Almost optimal lower bounds for small depth circuits”, Advances in Computing Research 5 (1989), 143–170.
1993 László Babai and Shlomo Moran, “Arthur-Merlin games : a randomized proof system and a hierarchy of complexity classes”, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 36 (1988), 254–276.
Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, “The knowledge complexity | ||||
2453 | dbpedia | 2 | 76 | https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pubs/algorithm.html | en | The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science | [
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/backgrounds/dcW.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pics/dog-lecture.jpg",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/notes_black.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/notes_black.gif",
"https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/pics/gordon-moo... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | by Bernard Chazelle
hen the great Dane of 20th century physics, Niels Bohr, was not busy chewing on a juicy morsel of quantum mechanics, he was known to yap away witticisms worthy of Yogi Berra. The classic Bohrism “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” alas came too late to save Lord Kelvin. Just as physics was set to debut in Einstein's own production of Extreme Makeover, Kelvin judged the time ripe to pen the field's obituary: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” Not his lordship's finest hour.
Nor his worst. Aware that fallibility is the concession the genius makes to common mortals to keep them from despairing, Kelvin set early on to give the mortals much to be hopeful about. To wit, the thermodynamics pioneer devoted the first half of his life to studying hot air and the latter half to blowing it. Ever the perfectionist, he elevated to an art form the production of pure, unadulterated bunk: “X-rays will prove to be a hoax”; “Radio has no future”; “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”; and my personal favorite, “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” Kelvin's crystal ball was the gift that kept on giving.
“ Soon, my friends, you will look at a child's
homework — and see nothing to eat. ”
Gloat not at a genius' misfortunes. Futurologitis is an equal-opportunity affliction, one hardly confined to the physicist's ward. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” averred IBM Chairman, Thomas Watson, a gem of prescience matched only by a 1939 New York Times editorial: “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it.” The great demographer Thomas Malthus owes much of his fame to his loopy prediction that exponentially increasing populations would soon outrun the food supply. As the apprentice soothsayer learns in “Crystal Gazing 101,” never predict a geometric growth!
Apparently, Gordon Moore skipped that class. In 1965, the co-founder of semiconductor giant Intel announced his celebrated law: Computing power doubles every two years. Moore's Law has, if anything, erred on the conservative side. Every eighteen months, an enigmatic pagan ritual will see white-robed sorcerers silently shuffle into a temple dedicated to the god of cleanliness, and soon reemerge with, on their faces, a triumphant smile and, in their hands, a silicon wafer twice as densely packed as the day before. No commensurate growth in human mental powers has been observed: this has left us scratching our nonexpanding heads, wondering what it is we've done to deserve such luck.
To get a feel for the magic, consider that the latest Sony PlayStation would easily outpace the fastest supercomputer from the early nineties. If not for Moore's Law, the Information Superhighway would be a back alley to Snoozeville; the coolest thing about the computer would still be the blinking lights. And so, next time you ask who engineered the digital revolution, expect many hands to rise. But watch the long arm of Moore's Law tower above all others. Whatever your brand of high-tech addiction, be it IM, iPod, YouTube, or Xbox, be aware that you owe it first and foremost to the engineering wizardry that has sustained Moore's predictive prowess over the past forty years.
Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't. Within a few decades, say the optimists, a repeal is all but certain. Taking their cue from Bill Gates, the naysayers conjure up the curse of power dissipation, among other woes, to declare Moore's Law in the early stage of rigor mortis. Facing the bleak, sorrowful tomorrows of The Incredible Shrinking Chip That Won't Shrink No More, what's a computer scientist to do?
The rule of law
Break out the Dom and pop the corks, of course! Moore's Law has added fizz and sparkle to the computing cocktail, but for too long its exhilarating potency has distracted the party-goers from their Holy Grail quest: How to unleash the full computing and modeling power of the Algorithm. Not to stretch the metaphor past its snapping point, the temptation is there for the Algorithmistas (my tribe) to fancy themselves as the Knights of the Round Table and look down on Moore's Law as the Killer Rabbit, viciously elbowing King Arthur's intrepid algorithmic warriors. Just as an abundance of cheap oil has delayed the emergence of smart energy alternatives, Moore's Law has kept algorithms off center stage. Paradoxically, it has also been their enabler: the killer bunny turned sacrificial rabbit who sets the track champion on a world record pace, only to fade into oblivion once the trophy has been handed out. With the fading imminent, it is not too soon to ask why the Algorithm is destined to achieve celebrity status within the larger world of science. While you ask, let me boldly plant the flag and bellow the battle cry:
“The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
If you think such a blinding flare of hyperbole surely blazed right out of Lord Kelvin's crystal ball, read on and think again. A computer is a storyteller and algorithms are its tales. We'll get to the tales in a minute but, first, a few words about the storytelling.
Computing is the meeting point of three powerful concepts: universality, duality, and self-reference. In the modern era, this triumvirate has bowed to the class-conscious influence of the tractability creed. The creed's incessant call to complexity class warfare has, in turn, led to the emergence of that ultimate class leveler: the Algorithm. Today, not only is this new “order” empowering the e-technology that stealthily rules our lives; it is also challenging what we mean by knowing, believing, trusting, persuading, and learning. No less. Some say the Algorithm is poised to become the new New Math, the idiom of modern science. I say The Sciences They Are A-Changin' and the Algorithm is Here to Stay.
Reread the previous paragraph. If it still looks like a glorious goulash of blathering nonsense, good! I shall now explain, so buckle up!
The universal computer
Had Thomas Jefferson been a computer scientist, school children across the land would rise in the morning and chant these hallowed words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all computers are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Universality and the separation of Data, Control, and Command.”
Computers come in different shapes, sizes, and colors, but all are created equal—indeed, much like 18th century white male American colonists. Whatever the world's fastest supercomputer can do (in 2006, that would be the IBM Blue Gene/L), your lowly iPod can do it, too, albeit a little more slowly. Where it counts, size doesn't matter: all computers are qualitatively the same. Even exotic beasts such as quantum computers, vector machines, DNA computers, and cellular automata can all be viewed as fancy iPods. That's universality!
The field of computing later
opened up to men
Here's how it works. Your iPod is a tripod (where did you think they got that name?), with three legs called control, program, and data. Together, the program and the data form the two sections of a document [program | data] that, to the untrained eye, resembles a giant, amorphous string of 0s and 1s. Something like this:
[ 1110001010110010010 | 1010111010101001110 ]
Each section has its own, distinct purpose: the program specifies instructions for the control to follow (eg, how to convert text into pdf); the data encodes plain information, like this essay (no, not plain in that sense). The data string is to be read, not to be read into. About it, Freud would have quipped: “Sometimes a string is just a string.” But he would have heard, seeping from the chambers of a program, the distant echoes of a dream: jumbled signs crying out for interpretation. To paraphrase the Talmudic saying, an uninterpreted program is like an unread letter. The beauty of the scheme is that the control need not know a thing about music. In fact, simply by downloading the appropriate program-data document, you can turn your iPod into: an earthquake simulator; a word processor; a web browser; or, if downloading is too much, a paperweight. Your dainty little MP3 player is a universal computer.
The control is the computer's brain and the sole link between program and data. Its only function in life is to read the data, interpret the program's orders, and act on them—a task so pedestrian that modern theory of reincarnation ranks the control as the lowest life form on the planet, right behind the inventor of the CD plastic wrap. If you smash your iPod open with a mallet and peek into its control, you'll discover what a marvel of electronics it is—okay, was. Even more marvelous is the fact that it need not be so. It takes little brainpower to follow orders blindly (in fact, too much tends to get in the way). Stretching this principle to the limit, one can design a universal computer with a control mechanism so simple that any old cuckoo clock will outsmart it. This begs the obvious question: did Orson Welles know that when he dissed the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks in “The Third Man”? It also raises a suspicion: doesn't the control need to add, multiply, divide, and do the sort of fancy footwork that would sorely test the nimblest of cuckoo clocks?
Alas, it still strikes the hours
No. The control on your laptop might indeed do all of those things, but the point is that it need not do so. (Just as a bank might give you a toaster when you open a new account, but it need not be a toaster; it could be a pet hamster.) Want to add? Write a program to add. Want to divide? Write a program to divide. Want to print? Write a program to print. A control that delegates all it can to the program's authority will get away with a mere two dozen different “states”—simplicity a cuckoo clock could only envy. If you want your computer to do something for you, don't just scream at the control: write down instructions in the program section. Want to catch trouts? Fine, append a fishing manual to the program string. The great nutritionist Confucius said it better: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The binary view of fishing = river + fisherman makes way for a universal one: fishing = river + fishing manual + you. Similarly,
computing = data + program + control.
This tripodal equation launched a scientific revolution, and it is to British mathematician Alan Turing that fell the honor of designing the launching pad. His genius was to let robots break out of the traditional binary brain-brawn mold, which conflates control and program, and embrace the liberating “tripod-iPod” view of computing. Adding a third leg to the robotic biped ushered in the era of universality: any computer could now simulate any other one.
Underpinning all of that, of course, was the digital representation of information: DVD vs VCR tape; piano vs violin; Anna Karenina vs Mona Lisa. The analog world of celluloid film and vinyl music is unfit for reproduction: doesn't die; just fades away. Quite the opposite, encoding information over an alphabet opens the door to unlimited, decay-free replication. In a universe of 0s and 1s, we catch a glimpse of immortality; we behold the gilded gates of eternity flung wide open by the bewitching magic of a lonely pair of incandescent symbols. In short, analog sucks, digital rocks.
Two sides of the same coin
Load your iPod with the program-data document [Print this | Print this]. Ready? Press the start button and watch the words “Print this” flash across the screen. Exciting, no? While you compose yourself with bated breath amid the gasps and the shrieks, take stock of what happened. To the unschooled novice, data and program may be identical strings, but to the cuckoo-like control they couldn't be more different: the data is no more than what it is; the program is no less than what it means. The control may choose to look at the string “Print this” either as a meaningless sequence of letters or as an order to commit ink to paper. To scan symbols mulishly or to deforest the land: that is the option at hand here—we call it duality.
So 1907, I almost hear you sigh. In that fateful year, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of linguistics, announced to a throng of admirers that there are two sides to a linguistic sign: its signifier (representation) and its signified (interpretation). A string is a sign that, under the watchful eye of the control, acts as signifier when data and as signified when a program.
Saussure's intellectual progeny is a breed of scholars known as semioticians. Funny that linguists, of all people, would choose for themselves a name that rhymes with mortician. Funny or not, semiotics mavens will point out the imperfect symmetry between program and data. The latter is inviolate. Signifiers must be treated with the utmost reverence: they could be passwords, hip-hop rhymes, or newfound biblical commandments. Mess with them at your own peril.
Programs are different. The encoding of the signified is wholly conventional. Take the program “Print this”, for example. A francophonic control would have no problem with “Imprimer ceci ” or, for that matter, with the obsequious “O, control highly esteemed, may you, noblest of cuckoos, indulge my impudent wish to see this humble string printed out, before my cup runneth over and your battery runneth out.” The plethora of programming languages reveals how so many ways there are of signifying the same thing. (Just as the plethora of political speeches reveals how so many ways there are of signifying nothing.)
Sensing the comic, artistic, and scholarly potential of the duality between program and data, great minds went to work. Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” routine is built around the confusion between a baseball player's nickname (the signifier) and the pronoun “who” (the signified). Magritte's celebrated painting “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe) plays on the distinction between the picture of a pipe (the signifier) and a pipe one smokes (the signified). The great painter might as well have scribbled on a blank canvas: “Le signifiant n'est pas le signifié ” (the signifier is not the signified). But he didn't, and for that we're all grateful.
English scholars are not spared the slings and arrows of duality either. How more dual can it get than the question that keeps Elizabethan lit gurus awake at night: “Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?” And pity the dually tormented soul that would dream up such wacky folderol: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”
Say it ain't true
I am lying. Really? Then I am lying when I say I am lying; therefore, I am not lying. Yikes. But if I am not lying then I am not lying when I say I am lying; therefore, I am lying. Double yikes. Not enough yet? Okay, consider the immortal quip of the great American philosopher Homer Simpson: “Oh Marge, cartoons don't have any deep meaning; they're just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh.” If cartoons don't have meaning, then Homer's statement is meaningless (not merely a philosopher, the man is a cartoon character); therefore, for all we know, cartoons have meaning. But then Homer's point is... Doh! Just say it ain't true. Ain't true? No, please, don't say it ain't true! Because if it ain't true then ain't true ain't true, and so...
AAARRRGGGHHH !!!!!!
Beware of self-referencing, that is to say, of sentences that make statements about themselves. Two of the finest mathematical minds in history, Cantor and Gödel, failed to heed that advice and both went stark raving bonkers. As the Viennese gentleman with the shawl-draped couch already knew, self-reference is the quickest route to irreversible dementia.
Escher's reproductive parts
It is also the salt of the computing earth. Load up your iPod, this time with the program-data document [Print this twice | Print this twice]. Push the start button and see the screen light up with the words: “Print this twice Print this twice”. Lo and behold, the thing prints itself! Well, not quite: the vertical bar is missing. To get everything right and put on fast track your career as a budding computer virus artist, try this instead: [Print this twice, starting with a vertical bar the second time | Print this twice, starting with a vertical bar the second time]. See how much better it works now! The key word in the self-printing business is “twice”: “never” would never work; “once” would be once too few; “thrice”?? Please watch your language.
Self-reproduction requires a tightly choreographed dance between: (i) a program explaining how to copy the data; (ii) a data string describing that very same program. By duality, the same sequence of words (or bits) is interpreted in two different ways; by self-reference, the duality coin looks the same on both sides. Self-reference—called recursion in computer parlance—requires duality; not the other way around. Which is why the universal computer owes its existence to duality and its power to recursion. If Moore's Law is the fuel of Google, recursion is its engine.
The tripodal view of computing was the major insight of Alan Turing—well, besides this little codebreaking thing he did in Bletchley Park that helped win World War II. Not to discount the lush choral voices of Princeton virtuosos Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, and John von Neumann, it is Maestro Turing who turned into a perfect opus the hitherto disjointed scores of the computing genre.
Mother Nature, of course, scooped them all by a few billion years. Your genome consists of two parallel strands of DNA that encode all of your genetic inheritance. Your morning addiction to Cocoa Puffs, your night cravings for Twinkies? Yep, it's all in there. Now if you take the two strands apart and line them up, you'll get two strings about three billion letters long. Check it out:
[ ACGGTATCCGAATGC... | TGCCATAGGCTTACG... ]
There they are: two twin siblings locking horns in a futile attempt to look different. Futile because if you flip the As into Ts and the Cs into Gs (and vice versa) you'll see each strand morph into the other one. The two strings are the same in disguise. So flip one of them to get a more symmetric layout. Like this:
[ ACGGTATCCGAATGC... | ACGGTATCCGAATGC... ]
Was I the only one to spot a suspicious similarity with [Print this twice | Print this twice] or did you, too? Both are program-data documents that provide perfectly yummy recipes for self-reproduction. Life's but a walking shadow, said Macbeth. Wrong. Life's but a self-printing iPod! Ministry-of-Virtue officials will bang on preachily about there being more to human life than the blind pursuit of self-replication, a silly notion that Hollywood's typical fare swats away daily at a theater near you. Existential angst aside, the string “ACGGTATCCGAATGC...” is either plain data (the genes constituting your DNA) or a program whose execution produces, among other things, all the proteins needed for DNA replication, plus all of the others needed for the far more demanding task of sustaining your Cocoa Puffs addiction. Duality is the choice you have to think of your genome either as a long polymer of nucleotides (the data to be read) or as the sequence of amino acids forming its associated proteins (the “programs of life”). Hence the fundamental equation of biology:
Life = Duality + Self-reference
“ Elementary, my dear Watson! ”
On April 25, 1953, the British journal Nature published a short article whose understated punchline was the shot heard 'round the world: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” In unveiling to the world the molecular structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick broke the Code of Life. In so doing, they laid bare the primordial link between life and computing. One can easily imagine the reaction of that other codebreaker from Bletchley Park: “Duality and self-reference embedded in molecules? Jolly good to know God thinks like me.”
Turing's swagger would have been forgivable. After all, here was the man who had invented the computer. Here was the man who had put the mind-matter question on a scientific footing. Here was the man who had saved Britain from defeat in 1941 by breaking the Nazi code. Alas, good deeds rarely go unpunished. In lieu of a knighthood, a grateful nation awarded Alan Turing a one-way ticket to Palookaville, England: a court conviction for homosexuality with a sentence of forced estrogen injections. On June 7, 1954, barely one year to the day of Watson and Crick's triumph, Alan Turing went home, ate an apple laced with cyanide, and died. His mother believed, as a mother would, that it was an accident.
The modern era
The post-Turing years saw the emergence of a new computing paradigm: tractability. Its origin lay in the intuitive notion that checking a proof of Archimedes's theorem can't be nearly as hard as finding it in the first place; enjoying a coke must be simpler than discovering its secret recipe (or so the Coca Cola Company hopes), falling under the spell of 'Round Midnight ought to be easier than matching Monk's composing prowess. But is it really? Amazingly, no one knows. Welcome to the foremost open question in all of computer science!
Ever wondered whether the 1,000-song library stored in your iPod could be reordered and split up to form two equal-time playlists? Probably not. But suppose you wanted to transfer your songs to the two sides of an extra-length cassette while indulging your lifelong passion for saving money on magnetic tape. Which songs would you put on which side so as to use as little tape as possible? Now you'd be wondering, wouldn't you? (Humor me: say yes.)
“First you prove it,
then you let it sink in.”
You wouldn't wonder long, anyway. After a minute's reflection, you'd realize you didn't have the faintest idea how to do that. (Warning: splitting a tune in the middle is a no-no.) Of course, you could try all possibilities but that's a big number—roughly 1 followed by 300 zeroes. Ah, but your amazing friend Alice, she knows! Or so she says. Then why not just get the two playlists from her? By adding up a few numbers, you'll easily verify that she's not lying and that, indeed, both lists have the same playing time. What Alice will hand you over is, in essence, a proof that your song library can be split evenly. Your job will be reduced to that of proof-checking, a task at which a compulsive tape-saving Scrooge might even shine. Heads-up: did you notice my nonchalant use of the word “lying”? When a movie's opening scene casually trains the camera on a gun, no one might get hurt for a while, but you know that won't last.
Alas, wondrous Alice fell down the rabbit hole eons ago and, these days, a good library splitting friend is hard to find. And so, sadly, you'll have little choice but to compile the two lists yourself and engage in that dreaded thing called proof-finding. That's a tougher nut to crack. So much so that even if you were to harness the full power of an IBM Blue Gene/L running the best software available anywhere on earth and beyond, the entire lifetime of the universe wouldn't be enough! You might get lucky with the parameters and get it done sooner, but getting lucky? Yeah, right...
To add insult to injury, computer scientists have catalogued thousands of such Jurassic problems—so named for the dinosaur-like quality of their solutions: hard to discover but impossible to miss when they pop up in front of you; in other words, proofs hopelessly difficult to find but a breeze to verify. Courtesy of Murphy's Law, of course, the great Jurassics of the world include all of the hydra-headed monsters we're so desperate to slay: drug design; protein folding; resource allocation; portfolio optimization; suitcase packing; etc. Furthermore, even shooting for good approximate solutions—when the notion makes sense—can sometimes be just as daunting.
Now a funny thing happened on the way back from the word factory. Despite its dazzling lyricism, metaphorical felicity, hip-hoppish élan, not to mention a Niagara of adulatory gushing I'll kindly spare you, my staggeringly brilliant coinage “Jurassic” hasn't caught on. Yet. Skittish computer scientists tend to favor the achingly dull “NP-complete.” Worse, their idea of bustin' a dope, def funky rhyme is to—get this—write down the thing in full, as in “complete for nondeterministic polynomial time.” To each their own.
Back to the Jurassics. Always basking in the spotlight, they are famously difficult, impossibly hard to satisfy, and—if their resilience is any guide—quite pleased with the attention. These traits often run in the family; sure enough, the Jurassics are blood kin. The first to put them on the analyst's couch and pin their intractable behavior on consanguinity were Stephen Cook, Jack Edmonds, Richard Karp, and Leonid Levin. In the process they redefined computing around the notion of tractability and produced the most influential milestone in post-Turing computer science.
But what is a tractable problem, you ask? Answer: one that can be solved in polynomial time. Oh, swell; nothing like calling upon the opaque to come to the rescue of the obscure! Relax: it's quite simple, really. If you double the size of the problem—say, your iPod library will now hold 2,000 tunes instead of a mere 1,000—then the time to find an even split should at most double, or quadruple, or increase by some fixed rate (ie, independent of the problem size). That's what it means to be tractable. Convoluted as this definition may seem, it has two things going for it: one is to match our intuition of what can be solved in practice (assuming the fixed rate isn't “fixed” too high); the other is to leave the particular computer we're working on out of the picture. See how there is no mention of computing speeds; only of growth rates. It is a statement about software, not hardware. Tractability is a universal attribute of a problem—or lack thereof. Note: some scholars prefer the word feasibility. Obviously, to resist the lure of the opening riff of Wittgenstein's “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” takes willpower; predictably, the feasibility crowd is thin.
“ What do you mean, ‘intractable’ ? ”
Library splitting does not appear to be tractable. (Hold the tears: you'll need them in a minute.) Any algorithm humans have ever tried—and many have—requires exponential time. Read: all of them share the dubious distinction that their running times get squared (not merely scaled up by a constant factor) whenever one doubles the size of the problem. If you do the math, you'll see it's the sort of growth that quickly gets out of hand.
Well, do the math. Say you want to solve a problem that involves 100 numbers and the best method in existence takes one second on your laptop. How long would it take to solve the same problem with 200 numbers, instead? Answer: just a few seconds if it's tractable; and C× 2200 = (C× 2100)2100 = 2100 seconds if it's not. That's more than a billion trillion years! To paraphrase Senator Dirksen from the great State of Illinois, a trillion years here, a trillion years there, and pretty soon you're talking real time. Exponentialitis is not a pretty condition. Sadly, it afflicts the entire Jurassic menagerie.
The true nature of the ailment eludes us but this much we know: it's genetic. If any one of the Jurassics is tractable, wonder of wonders, all of them are. Better still: a cure for any one of them could easily be used to heal any of the others. Viewed through the tractability lens, the Jurassics are the same T. rex in different brontosaurus' clothings. Heady stuff! The day Alice can split your song library within a few hours will be the day biologists can fold proteins over breakfast, design new drugs by lunch, and eradicate deadly diseases just in time for dinner. The attendant medical revolution will likely make you live the long, jolly life of a giant Galápagos tortoise (life span: 150 years). Alice's discovery would imply the tractability of all the Jurassics (P=NP in computer lingo). Should the computing gods smile upon us, the practical consequences could be huge.
Granted, there would be a few losers: mostly online shoppers and mathematicians. All commercial transactions on the Internet would cease to be secure and e-business would grind to a halt. (More on this gripping drama in the next section.) The math world would take a hit, too: P=NP would prove Andrew Wiles, the conqueror of Fermat's Last Theorem, no more deserving of credit than his referee. Well, not quite. Mathematicians like to assign two purposes to a proof: one is to convince them that something is true; the other is to help them understand why something is true. Tractability bears no relevance to the latter. Still, no one wants to see friendly mathematicians swell the ranks of the unemployed as they get replaced by nano iPods, so the consensus has emerged that P is not NP. There are other reasons, too, but that one is the best because it puts computer scientists in a good light. The truth is, no one has a clue.
To be P or not to be P, that is NP's question. A million-dollar question, in fact. That's how much prize money the Clay Mathematics Institute will award Alice if she resolves the tractability of library splitting. (She will also be shipped to Guantánamo by the CIA, but that's a different essay.) Which side of the NP question should we root for? We know the stakes: a short existence blessed with online shopping (P≠NP); or the interminable, eBay-less life of a giant tortoise (P=NP). Tough call.
P=NP (Or why you won't find the proof on eBay)
An algorithm proving P=NP might conceivably do for technology what the discovery of the wheel did for land transportation. Granted, to discover the wheel is always nice, but to roll logs in the mud has its charms, too. Likewise, the intractability of proof-finding would have its benefits. That 1951 vintage Wham-O hula hoop you bought on eBay the other day, er, you didn't think the auction was secure just because online thieves were too hip for hula hoops, did you? What kept them at bay was the (much hoped-for) intractability of integer factorization.
Say what? Prime numbers deterring crooks? Indeed. Take two primes, S and T, each one, say, a thousand-digit long. The product R= S × T is about 2,000 digits long. Given S and T, your laptop will churn out R in a flash. On the other hand, if you knew only R, how hard would it be for you to retrieve S and T? Hard. Very hard. Very very hard. Repeat this until you believe it because the same algorithm that would find S and T could be used to steal your credit card off the Internet!
Cryptology will help you
win wars and shop online
Am I implying that computer security is premised on our inability to do some silly arithmetic fast enough? I surely am. If the Jurassics were shown to be tractable, not a single computer security system would be safe. Which is why for eBay to auction off a proof of P=NP would be suicidal. Worse: factoring is not even known—or, for that matter, thought—to be one of the Jurassics. It could well be a cuddly pet dinosaur eager to please its master (if only its master had the brains to see that). One cannot rule out the existence of a fast factoring algorithm that would have no incidence on the P=NP question.
In fact, such an algorithm exists. All of the recent hoopla about quantum computing owes to the collective panic caused by Peter Shor's discovery that factoring is tractable on a quantum iPod. That building the thing itself is proving quite hopeless has helped to calm the frayed nerves of computer security experts. And yet there remains the spine-chilling possibility that maybe, just maybe, factoring is doable in practice on a humble laptop. Paranoid security pros might want to hold on to their prozac a while longer.
Cryptology is a two-faced Janus. One side studies how to decrypt the secret messages that bad people exchange among one another. That's cryptanalysis: think Nazi code, Bletchley Park, victory parade, streamers, confetti, sex, booze, and rock 'n' roll. The other branch of the field, cryptography, seeks clever ways of encoding secret messages for good people to send to other good people, so that bad people get denied the streamers, the confetti, and all the rest. Much of computer security relies on public-key cryptography. The idea is for, say, eBay to post an encryption algorithm on the web that everybody can use. When you are ready to purchase that hula hoop, you'll type in your credit card information into your computer, encrypt it right there, and then send the resulting gobbledygook over the Internet. Naturally, the folks at eBay will need their own secret decryption algorithm to make sense of the junk they'll receive from you. (Whereas poor taste is all you'll need to make sense of the junk you'll receive from them.) The punchline is that no one should be able to decrypt anything unless they have that secret algorithm in their possession.
“Remember, guys, not a word about
our factoring algorithm, okay? ”
Easier said than done. Consider the fiendishly clever algorithm that encodes the first two words of this sentence as dpotjefs uif. So easy to encrypt: just replace each letter in the text by the next one in the alphabet. Now assume you knew this encryption scheme. How in the world would you go about decrypting a message? Ah, this is where algorithmic genius kicks in. (Algorithmistas get paid the big bucks for a reason.) It's a bit technical so I'll write slowly: replace each letter in the ciphertext by the previous one in the alphabet. Ingenious, no? And fast, too! The only problem with the system is that superior minds can crack it. So is there a cryptographic scheme that is unbreakable, irrespective of how many geniuses roam the earth? It should be child's play to go one way (encrypt) but a gargantuan undertaking to go back (decrypt)—unless, that is, one knows the decryption algorithm, in which case it should be a cinch.
RSA, named after Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman, is just such a scheme. It's an exceedingly clever, elegant public-key cryptosystem that, amazingly, requires only multiplication and long division. It rules e-commerce and pops up in countless security applications. Its universal acclaim got its inventors the Turing award (the “Nobel prize” of computer science). More important, it got Rivest a chance to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the first Red Sox-Yankees game of the 2004 season. Yes, RSA is that big! There is one catch, though (pun intended): if factoring proves to be tractable then it's bye-bye RSA, hello shopping mall.
The computational art of persuasion
Isn't intractability just a variant of undecidability, the mother's milk of logicians? One notion evokes billions of years, the other eternity—what's the difference? Whether the execution of [program | data] ever terminates is undecidable. In other words, one cannot hope to find out by writing another program and reading the output of [another program | [program | data]]. Of side interest, note how the whole document [program | data] is now treated as mere data: an artful cadenza from Maestro Turing.
Very nice, but how's undecidability helping us go through life with a smile on our face? It doesn't. In fact, no one ever tried to benefit from an undecidable problem who didn't wind up slouched face down on the Viennese gentleman's couch. Not so with intractable problems. Just as quantum mechanics shattered the platonic view of a reality amenable to noninvasive observation, tractability has clobbered classical notions of identity, randomness, and knowledge. And that's a good thing.
Why? Let me hereby declare two objects to be “identical” if to tell them apart is intractable, regardless of how different they might actually be. A deck of cards will be “perfectly” shuffled if it's impossible to prove it otherwise in polynomial time. It is one of the sweet ironies of computing that the existence of an intractable world out there makes our life down here so much easier. Think of it as the Olympics in reverse: if you can't run the 100-meter dash under 10 seconds, you win the gold!
Scientists of all stripes are insatiable consumers of random numbers: try taking a poll, conducting clinical trials, or running a lottery without them! To produce randomness can be quite arduous. To this day, only two methods have been scientifically validated. One of them is the infamous “Kitty Flop.” Strap buttered toast to the back of a cat and drop the animal from a PETA-approved height: if the butter hits the ground, record a 1; else a 0. For more bits, repeat. Randomness results from the tension between Murphy's law and the feline penchant for landing on one's feet. The other method is the classical “Coriolis Flush.” This time, go to the equator and flush the toilet: if the water whirls clockwise, your random bit is a 1; else it's a 0.
Now think how much easier it'd be if cheating were allowed. Not even bad plumbing could stop you (though many hope it would). Okay, your numbers are not truly random and your cards are not properly shuffled, but if to show they are not is intractable then why should you care? Hardness creates easiness. Of course, computer scientists have simply rediscovered what professional cyclists have known for years: the irresistible lure of intractability (of drug detection).
You're not thinking, I hope, that this is all perched on the same moral high ground as Don Corleone's philosophy that crime is not breaking the law but getting caught. If you are, will you please learn to think positive? Our take on intractability is really no different from the 1894 Supreme Court decision in Coffin vs US that introduced to American jurisprudence the maxim “Innocent until proven guilty.” Reality is not what is but what can be proven to be (with bounded patience). If you think this sort of tractability-induced relativism takes us down the garden path, think again. It actually cleanses classical notions of serious defects.
Take knowledge, for example: here's something far more faith-based than we'd like to admit. We “know” that the speed of light is constant, but who among us has actually bothered to measure it? We know because we trust. Not all of us have that luxury. Say you're a fugitive from the law. (Yes, I know, your favorite metaphor.) The authorities don't trust you much and—one can safely assume—the feeling is mutual. How then can you convince the police of your innocence? Reveal too little and they won't believe you. Reveal too much and they'll catch you. Intractability holds the key to the answer. And the Feds hold the key to my prison cell if I say more. Sorry, nothing to see here, move along.
Fresh, juicy primes!
Years have passed and you've traded your fugitive's garb for the funky duds of a math genius who's discovered how to factor integers in a flash. Sniffing a business opportunity, you offer to factor anybody's favorite number for a small fee. There might be a huge market for that, but it's less clear there's nearly enough gullibility around for anyone to take you up on your offer—especially with your mugshot still hanging in the post office. No one is likely to cough up any cash unless they can see the prime factors. But then why would you reward such distrust by revealing the factors in the first place? Obviously, some confidence-building is in order.
What will do the trick is a dialogue between you and the buyer that persuades her that you know the factors, all the while leaking no information about them whatsoever. Amazingly, such an unlikely dialogue exists: for this and, in fact, for any of our Jurassics. Alice can convince you that she can split up your iPod library evenly without dropping the slightest hint about how to do it. (A technical aside: this requires a slightly stronger intractability assumption than P≠NP.) Say hello to the great zero-knowledge (ZK) paradox: a congenital liar can convince a hardened skeptic that she knows something without revealing a thing about it. ZK dialogues leave no option but for liars to tell the truth and for doubting Thomases to believe. They render dishonesty irrelevant, for trusting comes naturally to a society where all liars get caught.
What's intractability got to do with it? Everything. If factoring were known to be tractable, the buyer would need no evidence that you could factor: she could just do it herself and ignore your services—bakers don't buy bread. At this point, the reader might have a nagging suspicion of defective logic: if factoring is so hard, then who's going to be the seller? Superman? In e-commerce applications, numbers to be factored are formed by multiplying huge primes together. In this way, the factors are known ahead of time to those privy to this process and live in intractability limboland for all others.
The book of zero-knowledge
It gets better. Not only can two parties convince each other of their respective knowledge without leaking any of it; they can also reason about it. Two businessmen get stuck in an elevator. Naturally, a single thought runs through their minds: finding out who's the wealthier. Thanks to ZK theory, they'll be able to do so without revealing anything about their own worth (material worth, that is—the other kind is already in full view).
Feel the pain of two nuclear powers, Learsiland and Aidniland. Not being signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only they know the exact size of their nuclear arsenals (at least one hopes they do). Computing theory would allow Learsiland to prove to Aidniland that it outnukes it without leaking any information about its deterrent's strength. The case of Nariland is more complex: it only wishes to demonstrate compliance with the NPT (which it's signed) without revealing any information about its nuclear facilities. While these questions are still open, they are right up ZK 's alley. Game theorists made quite a name for themselves in the Cold War by explaining why the aptly named MAD strategy of nuclear deterrence was not quite as mad as it sounded. Expect zero-knowledgists to take up equally daunting “doomsday” challenges in the years ahead. And, when they do, get yourself a large supply of milk and cookies, a copy of Kierkegaard's “Fear and Trembling,” and unrestricted access to a deep cave.
More amazing than ZK still is this thing called PCP (for “probabilistically checkable proofs; not for what you think). For a taste of it, consider the sociological oddity that great unsolved math problems seem to attract crackpots like flypaper. Say I am one of them. One day I call the folks over at the Clay Math Institute to inform them that I've just cracked the Riemann hypothesis (the biggest baddest beast in the math jungle). And could they please deposit my million-dollar check into my Nigerian account presto? Being the gracious sort, Landon and Lavinia Clay indulge me with a comforting “Sure,” while adding the perfunctory plea: “As you know, we're a little fussy about the format of our math proofs. So please make sure yours conforms to our standards—instructions available on our web site, blah, blah.” To my relief, that proves quite easy—even with that damn caps lock key stuck in the down position—and the new proof is barely longer than the old one. Over at Clay headquarters, meanwhile, no one has any illusions about me (fools!) but, bless the lawyers, they're obligated to verify the validity of my proof.
“Gotta run. Let's try PCP ! ”
To do that, they've figured out an amazing way, the PCP way. It goes like this: Mr and Mrs Clay will pick four characters from my proof at random and throw the rest in the garbage without even looking at it. They will then assemble the characters into a four-letter word and read it out loud very slowly—it's not broadcast on American TV, so it's okay. Finally, based on that word alone, they will declare my proof valid or bogus. The kicker: their conclusion will be correct! Granted, there's a tiny chance of error due to the use of random numbers, but by repeating this little game a few times they can make a screwup less likely than having their favorite baboon type all of Hamlet in perfect Mandarin.
At this point, no doubt you're wondering whether to believe this mumbo-jumbo might require not only applying PCP but also smoking it. If my proof is correct, I can see how running it through the Clays' gauntlet of checks and tests would leave it unscathed. But, based on a lonely four-letter word, how will they know I've cracked Riemann's hypothesis and not a baby cousin, like the Riemann hypothesis for function fields, or a baby cousin's baby cousin like 1+1=2? If my proof is bogus (perish the thought) then their task seems equally hopeless. Presumably, the formatting instructions are meant to smear any bug across the proof so as to corrupt any four letters picked at random. But how can they be sure that, in order to evade their dragnet, I haven't played fast and loose with their silly formatting rules? Crackpots armed with all-caps keyboards will do the darndest thing. Poor Mr and Mrs Clay! They must check not only my math but also my abidance by the rules. So many ways to cheat, so few things to check.
When Abu's light was
shining on Baghdad
PCP is the ultimate lie-busting device. Why ultimate? Because it is instantaneous and foolproof. The time-honored approach to truth finding is the court trial, where endless questioning between two parties, each one with good reasons to lie, leads to the truth or to a mistrial, but never to an erroneous judgment (yes, I know). PCP introduces the instant-trial system. Once the case has been brought before the judge, it is decided on the spot after only a few seconds of cross-examination. Justice is fully served; and yet the judge will go back to her chamber utterly clueless as to what the case was about. PCP is one of the most amazing algorithms of our time. It steals philosophy's thunder by turning on its head basic notions of evidence, persuasion, and trust. Somewhere, somehow, Ludwig the Tractatus Man is smiling.
To say that we're nowhere near resolving P vs NP is a safe prophecy. But why? There are few mysteries in life that human stupidity cannot account for, but to blame the P=NP conundrum on the unbearable lightness of our addled brains would be a cop-out. Better to point the finger at the untamed power of the Algorithm—which, despite rumors to the contrary, was not named after Al Gore but after Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. As ZK and PCP demonstrate, tractability reaches far beyond the racetrack where computing competes for speed. It literally forces us to think differently. The agent of change is the ubiquitous Algorithm. Let's look over the horizon where its disruptive force beckons, shall we?
Thinking algorithmically
Algorithms are often compared to recipes. As clichés go, a little shopworn perhaps, but remember: no metaphor that appeals to one's stomach can be truly bad. Furthermore, the literary analogy is spot-on. Algorithms are—and should be understood as—works of literature. The simplest ones are short vignettes that loop through a trivial algebraic calculation to paint fractals, those complex, pointillistic pictures much in vogue in the sci-fi movie industry. Just a few lines long, these computing zingers will print the transcendental digits of π, sort huge sets of numbers, model dynamical systems, or tell you on which day of the week your 150th birthday will fall (something whose relevance we've already covered). Zingers can do everything. For the rest, we have, one notch up on the sophistication scale, the sonnets, ballads, and novellas of the algorithmic world. Hiding behind their drab acronyms, of which RSA, FFT, SVD, LLL, AKS, KMP, and SVM form but a small sample, these marvels of ingenuity are the engines driving the algorithmic revolution currently underway. (And, yes, you may be forgiven for thinking that a computer geek's idea of culinary heaven is a nice big bowl of alphabet soup.) At the rarefied end of the literary range, we find the lush, complex, multilayered novels. The Algorithmistas' pride and joy, they are the big, glorious tomes on the coffee table that everyone talks about but only the fearless read.
“ ‘ fetch branch push load store jump fetch... ’
Who writes this crap? ”
Give it to them, algorithmic zingers know how to make a scientist swoon. No one who's ever tried to calculate the digits of π by hand can remain unmoved at the sight of its decimal expansion flooding a computer screen like lava flowing down a volcano. Less impressive perhaps but just as useful is this deceptively simple data retrieval technique called binary search, or BS for short. Whenever you look up a friend's name in the phone book, chances are you're using a variant of BS—unless you're the patient type who prefers exhaustive search (ES) and finds joy in combing through the directory alphabetically till luck strikes. Binary search is exponentially (ie, incomparably) faster than ES. If someone told you to open the phone book in the middle and check whether the name is in the first or second half; then ordered you to repeat the same operation in the relevant half and go on like that until you spotted your friend's name, you would shoot back: “That's BS!”
Well, yes and no. Say your phone book had a million entries and each step took one second: BS would take only twenty seconds but ES would typically run for five days! Five days?! Imagine that. What if it were an emergency and you had to look up the number for 911? (Yep, there's no low to which this writer won't stoop.) The key to binary search is to have an ordered list. To appreciate the relevance of sorting, suppose that you forgot the name of your friend (okay, acquaintance) but you had her number. Since the phone numbers typically appear in quasi-random order, the name could just be anywhere and you'd be stuck with ES. There would be two ways for you to get around this: to be the famous Thomas Magnum and bribe the Honolulu police chief to get your hands on the reverse directory; or to use something called a hash table: a key idea of computer science.
Hash table? Hmm, I know what you're thinking: Algorithmistas dig hash tables; they're down for PCP; they crack codes; they get bent out of shape by morphin'; they swear by quicksnort (or whatever it's called). Coincidence? Computer scientists will say yes, but what else are they supposed to say?
Algorithms for searching the phone book or spewing out the digits of π are race horses: their sole function is to run fast and obey their masters. Breeding Triple Crown winners has been high on computer science's agenda—too high, some will say. Blame this on the sheer exhilaration of the sport. Algorithmic racing champs are creatures of dazzling beauty, and a chance to breed them is a rare privilege. That said, whizzing around the track at lightning speed is not the be-all and end-all of algorithmic life. Creating magic tricks is just as highly prized: remember RSA, PCP, ZK. The phenomenal rise of Google's fortunes owes to a single algorithmic gem, PageRank, leavened by the investing exuberance of legions of believers. To make sense of the World Wide Web is algorithmic in a qualitative sense. Speed is a secondary issue. And so PageRank, itself no slouch on the track, is treasured for its brains, not its legs.
Hold on! To make sense of the world, we have math. Who needs algorithms? It is beyond dispute that the dizzying success of 20th century science is, to a large degree, the triumph of mathematics. A page's worth of math formulas is enough to explain most of the physical phenomena around us: why things fly, fall, float, gravitate, radiate, blow up, etc. As Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Granted, Einstein's assurance that something is comprehensible might not necessarily reassure everyone, but all would agree that the universe speaks in one tongue and one tongue only: mathematics.
“Don't google us, we'll google you.”
But does it, really? This consensus is being challenged today. As young minds turn to the sciences of the new century with stars in their eyes, they're finding old math wanting. Biologists have by now a pretty good idea of what a cell looks like, but they've had trouble figuring out the magical equations that will explain what it does. How the brain works is a mystery (or sometimes, as in the case of our 43rd president, an overstatement) whose long, dark veil mathematics has failed to lift.
Economists are a refreshingly humble lot—quite a surprise really, considering how little they have to be humble about. Their unfailing predictions are rooted in the holy verities of higher math. True to form, they'll sheepishly admit that this sacred bond comes with the requisite assumption that economic agents, also known as humans, are benighted, robotic dodos—something which unfortunately is not always true, even among economists.
A consensus is emerging that, this time around, throwing more differential equations at the problems won't cut it. Mathematics shines in domains replete with symmetry, regularity, periodicity—things often missing in the life and social sciences. Contrast a crystal structure (grist for algebra's mill) with the World Wide Web (cannon fodder for algorithms). No math formula will ever model whole biological organisms, economies, ecologies, or large, live networks. Will the Algorithm come to the rescue? This is the next great hope. The algorithmic lens on science is full of promise—and pitfalls.
First, the promise. If you squint hard enough, a network of autonomous agents interacting together will begin to look like a giant distributed algorithm in action. Proteins respond to local stimuli to keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing, and your eyes glued to this essay—how more algorithmic can anything get? The concomitance of local actions and reactions yielding large-scale effects is a characteristic trait of an algorithm. It would be naive to expect mere formulas like those governing the cycles of the moon to explain the cycles of the cell or of the stock market.
Contrarians will voice the objection that an algorithm is just a math formula in disguise, so what's the big hoopla about? The answer is: yes, so what? The issue here is not logical equivalence but expressibility. Technically, number theory is just a branch of set theory, but no one thinks like that because it's not helpful. Similarly, the algorithmic paradigm is not about what but how to think. The issue of expressiveness is subtle but crucial: it leads to the key notion of abstraction and is worth a few words here (and a few books elsewhere).
Remember the evil Brazilian butterfly? Yes, the one that idles the time away by casting typhoons upon China with the flap of a wing. This is the stuff of legend and tall tales (also known as chaos theory). Simple, zinger-like algorithms model this sort of phenomenon while neatly capturing one of the tenets of computing: the capacity of a local action to unleash colossal forces on a global scale; complexity emerging out of triviality.
Al-Khwarizmi takes wing
Create a virtual aviary of simulated geese and endow each bird with a handful of simple rules: (1) Spot a flock of geese? Follow its perceived center; (2) Get too close to a goose? Step aside; (3) Get your view blocked by another goose? Move laterally away from it; etc. Release a hundred of these critters into the (virtual) wild and watch a distributed algorithm come to life, as a flock of graceful geese migrate in perfect formation. Even trivial rules can produce self-organizing systems with patterns of behavior that look almost “intelligent.” Astonishingly, the simplest of algorithms mediate that sort of magic.
The local rules of trivial zingers carry enough punch to produce complex systems; in fact, by Church-Turing universality, to produce any complex system. Obviously, not even algorithmic sonnets, novellas, or Homeric epics can beat that. So why bother with the distinction? Perhaps for the same reason the snobs among us are loath to blur the difference between Jay Leno and Leo Tolstoy. But isn't “War and Peace” just an endless collection of one-liners? Not quite. The subtlety here is called abstraction. Train your binoculars on a single (virtual) goose in flight and you'll see a bird-brained, rule-driven robot flying over Dullsville airspace. Zoom out and you'll be treated to a majestic flock of birds flying in formation. Abstraction is the ability to choose the zoom factor. Algorithmic novels allow a plethora of abstraction levels that are entirely alien to zingers.
Take war, for example. At its most basic, war is a soldier valiantly following combat rules on the battlefield. At a higher level of abstraction, it is a clash of warfare strategies. Mindful of Wellington's dictum that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (where they take their pillow fighting seriously), one might concentrate instead on the schooling of the officer corps. Clausewitz devotees who see war as politics by other means will adjust the zoom lens to focus on the political landscape. Abstraction can be vertical: a young English infantryman within a platoon within a company within a battalion within a regiment within a mass grave on the banks of the Somme.
Or it can be horizontal: heterogeneous units interacting together within an algorithmic “ecology.” Unlike zingers, algorithmic novels are complex systems in and of themselves. Whereas most of what a zinger does contributes directly to its output, the epics of the algorithmic world devote most of their energies to servicing their constituent parts via swarms of intricate data structures. Most of these typically serve functions that bear no direct relevance to the algorithm's overall purpose—just as the mRNA of a computer programmer rarely concerns itself with the faster production of Java code.
The parallel with biological organisms is compelling but far from understood. To this day, for example, genetics remains the art of writing the captions for a giant cartoon strip. Molecular snapshots segue from one scene to the next through plots narrated by circuit-like chemical constructs—zingers, really—that embody only the most rudimentary notions of abstraction. Self-reference is associated mostly with self-replication. In the algorithmic world, by contrast, it is the engine powering the complex recursive designs that give abstraction its amazing richness: it is, in fact, the very essence of computing. Should even a fraction of that power be harnessed for modeling purposes in systems biology, neuroscience, economics, or behavioral ecology, there's no telling what might happen (admittedly, always a safe thing to say). To borrow the Kuhn cliché, algorithmic thinking could well cause a paradigm shift. Whether the paradigm shifts, shuffles, sashays, or boogies its way into the sciences, it seems destined to make a lasting imprint.
Had Newton been hit by a flying
goose and not a falling apple...
Now the pitfalls. What could disrupt the rosy scenario we so joyfully scripted? The future of the Algorithm as a modeling device is not in doubt. For its revolutionary impact to be felt in full, however, something else needs to happen. Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? You're the unreconstructed Algorithm skeptic. Fresh from splitting your playlist, Alice, naturally, is the advocate. One day, she comes to you with a twinkle in her eye and a question on her mind: “What are the benefits of the central law of mechanics?” After a quick trip to Wikipedia to reactivate your high school physics neurons and dust off the cobwebs around them, you reply that F=ma does a decent job of modeling the motion of an apple as it is about to crash on Newton's head: “What's not to like about that?” “Oh, nothing,” retorts Alice, “except that algorithms can be faithful modelers, too; they're great for conducting simulations and making predictions.” Pouncing for the kill, she adds: “By the way, to be of any use, your vaunted formulas will first need to be converted into algorithms.” Touché.
Ahead on points, Alice's position will dramatically unravel the minute you remind her that F=ma lives in the world of calculus, which means that the full power of analysis and algebra can be brought to bear. From F=ma, for example, one finds that: (i) the force doubles when the mass does; (ii) courtesy of the law of gravity, the apple's position is a quadratic function of time; (iii) the invariance of Maxwell's equations under constant motion kills F=ma and begets the theory of special relativity. And all of this is done with math alone! Wish Alice good luck trying to get her beloved algorithms to pull that kind of stunt. Math gives us the tools for doing physics; more important, it gives us the tools for doing math. We get not only the equations but also the tools for modifying, combining, harmonizing, generalizing them; in short, for reasoning about them. We get the characters of the drama as well as the whole script!
Is there any hope for a “calculus” of algorithms that would enable us to knead them like Play-Doh to form new algorithmic shapes from old ones? Algebraic geometry tells us what happens when we throw in a bunch of polynomial equations together. What theory will tell us what happens when we throw in a bunch of algorithms together? As long as they remain isolated, free-floating creatures, hatched on individual whims for the sole purpose of dispatching the next quacking duck flailing in the open-problems covey, algorithms will be parts without a whole; and the promise of the Algorithm will remain a promise deferred.
While the magic of algorithms has long held computing theorists in its thrall, their potential power has been chronically underestimated; it's been the life story of the field, in fact, that they are found to do one day what no one thought them capable of doing the day before. If proving limitations on algorithms has been so hard, maybe it's because they can do so much. Algorithmistas will likely need their own “Google Earth” to navigate the treacherous canyons of Turingstan and find their way to the lush oases amid the wilderness. But mark my words: the algorithmic land will prove as fertile as the one the Pilgrims found in New England and its settlement as revolutionary.
Truth be told, the 1776 of computing is not quite upon us. If the Algorithm is the New World, we are still building the landing dock at Plymouth Rock. Until we chart out the vast expanses of the algorithmic frontier, the P vs NP mystery is likely to remain just that. Only when the Algorithm becomes not just a body but a way of thinking, the young sciences of the new century will cease to be the hapless nails that the hammer of old math keeps hitting with maniacal glee.
One thing is certain. Moore's Law has put computing on the map: the Algorithm will now unleash its true potential. That's one prediction Lord Kelvin never made, so you may safely trust the future to be kind to it.
“May the Algorithm's Force be with you.” | ||||||||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 18 | https://thmatters.wordpress.com/tcs-awards-list/ | en | TCS Awards List | [
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png",
"https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2018-05-25T15:32:36+00:00 | Below is a list of major awards that are relevant to the theoretical computer science community. Included is a brief description of each, a link to the nomination instructions, and examples of res… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Theory Matters | https://thmatters.wordpress.com/tcs-awards-list/ | Below is a list of major awards that are relevant to the theoretical computer science community. Included is a brief description of each, a link to the nomination instructions, and examples of researchers from TCS and related fields that won the award in the past.
Honorary Lectures
Lifetime Awards
Major Paper or Book, Set of Papers, etc.
Major Prizes
Mid-Career Awards
Service
Student Prizes
Thesis Prizes
Young Career Awards
Honorary Lectures
John von Neumann Lecture
For outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community.
Some recipients in TCS: Jennifer Chayes, Donald Knuth, Ingrid Daubechies, Richard Karp
link
Lifetime Awards
Claude Shannon Award
To honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory.
Some recipients in TCS: Robert Calderbank, Abbas El Gamal
link
Richard Hamming Medal
To honor an individual or team, up to three in number for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology.
Some recipients in TCS: Robert Calderbank, Abbas El Gamal, Michael Luby, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle
link
Kyoto Prize
To honor those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind in the area of advanced technology.
Some recipients in TCS: Laszlo Lovasz, Donaly Knuth
link
Simons Investigator
To support outstanding scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists.
Some recipients in TCS: Scott Aaronson, Boaz Barak, James Lee, Madhu Sudan, David Zuckerman, Dan Boneh, Subhash Khot, Chris Umans (2-3/year)
link
Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows program given by DoD (formerly National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship)
Seeks outstanding researchers to propose basic research that is potentially transformative in topics areas of interest to the DoD.
Some recipients in TCS: Scott Aaronson, Sean Hallgren, Umesh Vazirani
link
INFORMS Khachiyan Prize
Honors individual or a team for life-time achievements in the area of optimization; recognizes a sustained career of scholarship from nominees who are still active at the year of the nomination. The prize serves as an esteemed recognition of innovativeness and impact in the area of optimization, including theory and applications.
Some recipients in TCS: Jean Bernard Lasserre
link
ACM Fellow
ACM’s most prestigious member grade recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.
Some recipients in TCS: Edith Cohen, Shafi Goldwasser, Martin Grohe, Venkatesan Guruswami, Mor Harchol-Balter, Silvio Micali, Tal Rabin, Michael Sipser, R. Ravi, David Peleg, Erik Demaine, Mike Saks, Noga Alon, Monika Henzinger, Cynthia Dwork, Piotr Indyk
link
SIAM Fellow
To honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the discipline.
Some recipients in TCS: Ronald DeVore, Pablo Parrilo, Robin Thomas, Joel Spencer, Cynthia Phillips, David Williamson, Fan Chung, Charles Leiserson, Moshe Vardi, Dorit Hochbaum, Michel Goemans, Andrew Goldberg, Alan Frieze
link
IEEE Fellow
A distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.
Some recipients in TCS: Emmanuel Candes, Andrea Montanari, Rebecca Wright
link
AMS Fellow
Recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.
Some recipients in TCS: Emmanuel Candes, Peter Sarnak, Noga Alon, Michael Sipser, Victor Pan, Jennifer Chayes, Lenore Blum, Michel Goemans, Tom Leighton, Nick Pippenger, Dana Randall, Madhu Sudan, Joel Spencer, Eva Tardos, Prasad Tetali, Alan Frieze
link
IACR Fellow
To recognize outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions that: advance the science, technology, and practice of cryptology and related fields; promote the free exchange of ideas and information about cryptology and related fields; develop and maintain the professional skill and integrity of individuals in the cryptologic community; advance the standing of the cryptologic community in the wider scientific and technical world and promote fruitful relationships between the IACR and other scientific and technical organizations.
Some recipients in TCS: Juan Garay, Yuval Ishai, Paul Kocher, Stafford Tavares, Victor Shoup, Joe Kilian, Tal Rabin, Ran Canetti, Eyal Kushilevitz, Moti Yung
link
INFORMS Fellow
For distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS).
Some recipients in TCS: R. Ravi, Dick Karp, Nimrod Megiddo, David Shmoys, Eva Tardos
link
CS-Can/Info-Can Lifetime Achievemant Award
Recognize current or former faculty members in Canadian Computer Science Departments, Schools, Faculties who have made outstanding and sustained contributions to computing over their careers. The awards can be for achievement in research, teaching, service, or any combination of these.
Some recipients in TCS: David Kirkpatrick, Ian Munro, Steve Cook, Derek Corneil
link
EATCS Award
Given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career.
Some recipients in TCS: Noam Nisan, Eva Tardos, Dexter Kozen, Christos Papadimitriou, Gordon Plotkin, Martin Dyer, Moshe Vardi, Boris (Boaz) Trakhtenbrot, Kurt Mehlhorn
link
Major Paper or Book, Set of Papers, etc.
Godel Prize
For outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGACT).
Some recipients in TCS: Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith, Stephen Brookes, Peter W. O’Hearn, Daniel Spielman, Shang-Hua Teng, Ronald Fagin, Amnon Lotem, Moni Naor, Antoine Joux, Dan Boneh, Matthew K. Franklin, Elias Koutsoupias, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos, Noam Nisan, Amir Ronen
link
Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize
For outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics. The term “discrete mathematics” is interpreted broadly and is intended to include graph theory, networks, mathematical programming, applied combinatorics, applications of discrete mathematics to computer science, and related subjects.
Some recipients in TCS: Francisco Santos, Sanjeev Arora, Satish Rao, Umesh Vazirani, Anders Johansson, Jeff Kahn, Van H. Vu, Laszlo Lovasz, Balazs Szegedy
link
Prize in Game Theory and Computer Science in Honour of Ehud Kalai
Awarded to the person (or persons) who have published the best paper at the interface of game theory and computer science in the last decade.
Some recipients in TCS: Tim Roughgarden, Christos Papadimitriou, Costis Daskalakis, Paul Goldberg
link
ACM SigEcom Test of Time Award
Recognizes the author or authors of an influential paper or series of papers published between ten and twenty-five years ago that has significantly impacted research or applications exemplifying the interplay of economics and computation.
Some recipients in TCS: Gagan Aggarwal, Ashish Goel, Rajeev Motwani
link
INFORMS Computing Society Prize
For the best English language paper or group of related papers dealing with the Operations Research/Computer Science interface.
Some recipients in TCS: David Johnson, Pablo Parrilo, Peter Shor
link
INFORMS Applied Probability Society Best Publication Award
Recognizes outstanding contributions (a book, paper, or set of papers) to Applied Probability.
Some recipients in TCS: Andrea Montanari, Devavrat Shah, David Gamarnik
link
INFORMS Applied Probability Society Best Student Paper Prize
To identify and honor outstanding papers in the field of applied probability that are written primarily by a student. We define applied probability broadly, as any paper related to the modeling, analysis, and control of stochastic systems.
Some recipients in TCS: Guido Lagos
link
SIAM SIAG/Optimization Prize
Awarded to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper, as determined by the prize committee, on a topic in optimization published in English in a peer-reviewed journal.
Some recipients in TCS: Michel Goemans, David Williamson, Yinyu Ye
link
SIAM George Polya Prize for Mathematical Exposition
Awarded every two years to an outstanding expositor of the mathematical sciences. The prize may be awarded for a specific work or for the cumulative impact of multiple expository works that communicate mathematics effectively.
Some recipients in TCS: Nick Trefethen
link
SIAM George Polya Prize in Mathematics
Awarded every four years for a significant contribution, as evidenced by a refereed publication, in an area of mathematics of interest to George Pólya not covered by the George Pólya Prize in Combinatorics or the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition.
Some recipients in TCS: Emmanuel Candes, Terence Tao, Adam Marcus, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava
link
SIAM George Polya Prize in Combinatorics
Awarded every four years for a notable application of combinatorial theory. The prize is broadly intended to recognize specific recent work.
Some recipients in TCS: Van Vu, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, Noga Alon
link
SIAM SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize
Awarded to the author(s) of the two most outstanding papers, as determined by the prize committee, published in the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization (SICON) in the three calendar years before the award year.
Some recipients in TCS: Bernard Chazelle, Pablo Parrilo
link
SIAM Ralph E. Kleinman Prize
Awarded to one individual for outstanding research, or other contributions, that bridge the gap between mathematics and applications. Work that uses high-level mathematics and/or invents new mathematical tools to solve applied problems from engineering, science, and technology is particularly appropriate.
Some recipients in TCS: Emmanuel Candes, Anna Gilbert
link
AMS Levi L. Conant Prize
To recognize the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years.
Some recipients in TCS: Henry Cohn, Shlomo Hoory, Nati Linial, Avi Wigderson
link
Michael and Sheila Held Prize from the National Academy of Sciences
Honors outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory. This $100,000 prize is intended to recognize recent work (defined as published within the last eight years).
Some recipients in TCS: Prasad Raghavendra and David Steurer
link
Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing
The prize is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade.
Some recipients in TCS: Elizabeth Borowsky, Eli Gafni, Noga Alon, Laszlo Babai, Alon Itai, Michael Luby, Michael Ben-Or, Michael Rabin
link
The Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation
The prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution represented by a paper or small group of papers within the past 25 years. This time span allows the contribution to have established evidence of lasting impact and depth.
Some recipients in TCS: Tomas Feder, Moshe Vardi,
link
Major Prizes
Kannelakis Prize
Honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.
Some recipients in TCS: Amos Fiat, Moni Naor, Michael Luby, James Demmel
link
Knuth Prize
For outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science is awarded for major research accomplishments and contributions to the foundations of computer science over an extended period of time.
Some recipients in TCS: Oded Goldreich, Noam Nisan, Laszlo Babai, Richard Lipton, Gary Miller
link
IMU Nevanlinna Prize
Awarded once every 4 years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, for outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences.
Some recipients in TCS: Subhash Khot, Daniel Spielman, Jon Kleinberg
link
Turing Award
To recognize contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.
Some recipients in TCS: Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali
link
Mid-Career Awards
Shapley Lecture
Given at each World Congress of the Game Theory Society by a distinguished game theorist aged 40 or under at the time of the Lecture.
Some recipients in TCS: Tim Roughgarden
link
INFORMS Farkas prize
Awarded annually to a mid-career researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of optimization, over the course of their career. Such contributions could include papers (published or submitted and accepted), books, monographs, and software. The awardee will be within 25 years of their terminal degree as of January 1 of the year of the award.
Some recipients in TCS: Pablo Parrilo, Michel Goemans
link
ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made.
Some recipients in TCS: Craig Gentry, Omer Reingold, Tim Roughgarden, Brent Waters
link
EATCS Presburger Award
To a young scientist (in exceptional cases to several young scientists) for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers. Nominated scientists must be at most 35 years at the time of the deadline of nomination.
Some recipients in TCS: Mark Braverman, Xi Chen, Erik Demaine, Venkatesan Guruswami, Mihai Patrascu, Alexandra Silva, David Woodruff
link
NSF Alan T. Waterman Award
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) annual Alan T. Waterman Award honors an outstanding young U.S. scientist or engineer. The awardee receives a grant of $1 million over five years for scientific research or advanced study in any field of science, plus a medal and other recognition. Public Law 94-86 of the 94th Congress established the Waterman Award in 1975 to mark the 25th anniversary of the NSF and to honor its first director, Alan T. Waterman. Criteria: a candidate must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. He or she must be 40 years of age or younger, OR not more than 10 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree, by December 31st of the year in which they are nominated. The candidate should have demonstrated exceptional individual achievements in scientific or engineering research of sufficient quality to be placed at the forefront of his or her peers. Criteria also include originality, innovation and a significant impact on the individual’s field.
Some recipients in TCS: Scott Aronson, Subhash Khot, Herbert Edelsbrunner, Emmanuel Candes, Mung Chiang
link
ACM Prize in Computing
The award recognizes an early to mid-career fundamental innovative contribution in computing that, through its depth, impact and broad implications, exemplifies the greatest achievements in the discipline.
Some recipients in TCS: Dina Katabi, Alexei A. Efros, Stefan Savage, Dan Boneh
link
Service
ACM SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize
Awarded to an individual who has made substantial service contributions to the Theoretical Computer Science community.
Some recipients in TCS: Alistair Sinclair, Laszlo Babai, Avi Wigderson, Lance Fortnow
link
INFORMS Computing Society Harvey J. GreenBerg Service Award
Given to an individual in recognition of their impact on the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS).
Some recipients in TCS: Richard S. Barr
link
SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession
Awarded to an applied mathematician who has made distinguished contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national or international level.
Some recipients in TCS: John Hopcroft
link
EATCS Fellow
Awarded to a person having a track record of intellectual and organizational leadership within the EATCS community. Fellows are expected to be “model citizens” of the TCS community, helping to develop the standing of TCS beyond the frontiers of the community.
Some recipients in TCS: Jim Adamek, Susanne Albers, Artur Czumaj, Mike Fellows, Monika Henzinger, Thomas Henzinger, Giuseppe Italiano, Stefan Leonardi, Kurt Mehlhorn, Paul Spirakas, Aravind Srinivasan, Moshe Vardi, Moti Yung
link
Student Prizes
INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition
To identify and honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student.
Some recipients in TCS: Andrew Li, Bradley Sturt, Ramesh Johari
link
INFORMS ICS Student Paper Prize
Is given annually to the best paper on computing and operations research by a student author.
Some recipients in TCS: Guido Lagos
link
INFORMS ICS Student Paper Award
Is given annually to the best paper on computing and operations research by a student author.
Some recipients in TCS: Berk Ustun
link
SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Award (SIAM)
Awarded each year to an undergraduate student (or students for joint work) for outstanding research in mathematics.
Some recipients in TCS: Jacob Fox, Daniel Kane
link
SIAM Student Paper Prize
Awarded every year to the student author(s) of the most outstanding SIAM paper(s) submitted to the SIAM Student Paper Competition.
Some recipients in TCS: Emanuele Viola
link
SIAM Student Travel Awards
Given to help students gain the experience and exposure that comes from attending and presenting at SIAM conferences. The travel awards are intended to help students defray some of the costs of their attendance.
Awarded for SIAM conferences each year
link
Thesis Prizes
Mathematical Optimization Society Tucker Prize
Awarded at each International Symposium on Mathematical Programming for an outstanding doctoral thesis.
Some recipients in TCS: Daniel Dadush, Oliver Friedmann, Mohit Singh, Uday Shanbhag, Tim Roughgarden, Andrew Goldberg, Fabian Chudak
link
INFORMS Dantzig Prize
Given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice.
Some recipients in TCS: Negin Golrezaei, Ian Osband, Devavrat Shah, Alberto Caprara
link
ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award
Recognizes an outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation.
Some recipients in TCS: Aviad Rubinstein, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Matt Weinberg, Balu Sivan
link
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
Presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering.
Some recipients in TCS: Haitham Hassanieh, Aaron Sidford, Sanjam Garg, John Duchi
link
EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award
Given to promote and recognize outstanding dissertations in the field of theoretical computer science.
Some recipients in TCS: Bas Ketsman, Ilya Razenshteyn, Aviad Rubinstein, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Mika Goos, Steen Vester, Radu Curticapean, Heng Guo, Georg Zetzche, Karl Bringmann, Michal Skrzpczak, Mary Wootters
link
Young Career Awards
Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
To recognize and honor outstanding scientists and engineers at the outset of their independent research careers.
Some TCS recipients: Scott Aaronson, Sean Hallgren, Adam Smith
link
SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize
Awarded to an early career researcher who has done outstanding research in applied mathematics (defined as those topics covered by SIAM journals) and who has completed his/her doctoral dissertation and completed all other requirements for his/her doctorate during the period running from three years prior to the award date to one year prior to the award date.
Some recipients in TCS: David Williamson
link
INFORMS Young Researchers Prize
Awarded annually at the fall INFORMS Annual Meeting to one or more young researcher(s) for an outstanding paper in optimization that is published in, or submitted to and accepted by, a refereed professional journal within the four calendar years preceding the year of the award.
Some recipients in TCS: Kamal Jain, Tim Roughgarden
link
INFORMS Applied Probability Society Erlang Prize
A single prize will be awarded once every two years during even calendar years by the Applied Probability Society (APS) of INFORMS to an early career researcher who has made a significant contribution to applied probability.
Some recipients in TCS: Devavrat Shah
link
SIAM Early Career Travel Awards
Support for early career participants affiliated with U.S. institutions for travel to SIAM conferences through a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
Awarded for SIAM conferences each year
link
SIAM Denes Konig Prize
Awarded biennially to an early career researcher or early career researchers for outstanding research, as determined by the prize committee, in an area of discrete mathematics, based on a publication by the candidate(s) in a peer-reviewed journal published in the three calendar years prior to the year of the award.
Some recipients in TCS: Adam Wade Marcus, Zeev Dvir, Jacob Fox
link
CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award
Recognize excellence in research, and are made to top young faculty members in Canadian Computer Science Departments, Schools, Faculties who are within the first ten years of their career beyond the completion of their PhD.
Some recipients in TCS: Lap Chi Lau, Nick Harvey, Kevin Leyton-Brown
link
Maintained by David Woodruff (dwoodruf@cs.cmu.edu) | ||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 0 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2024/07/15/peter-shor-wins-ieee-2025-shannon-award/ | en | Peter Shor Wins IEEE 2025 Shannon Award | [
"https://www.hpcwire.com/wp-content/themes/tci-theme/assets/img/d_favicon.png",
"https://www.hpcwire.com/wp-content/themes/tci-theme/assets/img/eai_favicon.png",
"https://www.hpcwire.com/wp-content/themes/tci-theme/assets/img/hpcwj_favicon.png",
"https://www.hpcwire.com/wp-content/themes/tci-theme/assets/img/... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [
"John Russell"
] | 2024-07-15T00:00:00 | Peter Shor, the MIT mathematician whose ‘Shor’s algorithm’ sent shivers of fear through the encryption community and helped galvanize ongoing efforts to build quantum computers, has been named the 2025 […] | en | HPCwire | https://www.hpcwire.com/2024/07/15/peter-shor-wins-ieee-2025-shannon-award/ | Peter Shor, the MIT mathematician whose ‘Shor’s algorithm’ sent shivers of fear through the encryption community and helped galvanize ongoing efforts to build quantum computers, has been named the 2025 winner of the IEEE Claude Shannon Award for 2025. It’s a fitting honor for Shor, coming as it does on the eve of NIST’s expected issuance of the first Post Quantum Cryptography standards sometime this summer. (Don’t miss Shor’s limerick at the end of this article – I was tempted to lead with it.)
The Shannon Award is given by the IEEE Information Theory Society and was created in reconizes 1972 “to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. It is a prestigious prize in information theory, covering technical contributions at the intersection of mathematics, communication engineering, and theoretical computer science.”
Here’s some background on Shannon from Wikipedia: “Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the “father of information theory” and as the “father of the Information Age”. Shannon was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.”
Shor is an applied mathematician perhaps best known for his work on quantum computation. His eponymously named Shor’s algorithm was developed in 1994 and demonstrated how to use an adequately performant quantum computer to to break conventional RSA codes.
Broadly, it’s a factoring algorithm that if run on a “quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could operate without succumbing to quantum noise and other quantum-decoherence phenomena, then Shor’s algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes, such as: the RSA scheme; the Finite Field Diffie-Hellman key exchange; and the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange.”
RSA is based on the assumption that factoring large integers is computationally intractable and this assumption is generally considered valid for classical (non-quantum) computers.
Shor is an interesting person (brief bio below) who sometimes scribbles more than math. Here’s a pair of limericks (and explanation) he has posted on his website:
“My wife and I wrote the following for a poetry contest by Science News. It didn’t win, so I posted it on my web page. (Editor’s note – he doesn’t give the submission date)
If computers that you build are quantum,
Then spies of all factions will want ’em.
Our codes will all fail,
And they’ll read our email,
Till we’ve crypto that’s quantum, and daunt ’em.
Jennifer and Peter Shor
“When he introduced me at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians, Prof. Volker Strassen recited my limerick, and added a reply:
To read our E-mail, how mean
of the spies and their quantum machine;
Be comforted though,
they do not yet know
how to factorize twelve or fifteen. (Volker Strassen)
Gotta love it.
Brief Shor Bio
Peter Shor is Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics since 2003. He received the B.A. in mathematics from Caltech in 1981, and the Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1985, under the direction of Tom Leighton. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at MSRI, he joined AT&T. He was a member of its Research staff, 1986-2003. He joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics as full professor in 2003. Professor Shor’s research interests are in theoretical computer science: currently on algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry and combinatorics. In 1998, Peter Shor received the Nevanlinna Prize and the International Quantum Communication Award. He also received the Dickson Prize in Science from Carnegie-Mellon in 1998. He was awarded the Gödel Prize of the ACM and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999. He received the King Faisal International Prize in Science in 2002, and was named one of Caltech’s Distinguished Alumni in 2007. He is a member of the National Academy of Science (2002), and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). In 2017, Professor Shor received the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also received the 2017 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, jointly with Charles Bennett, Igor Devetak, Aram Harrow, and Andreas Winter for the paper “The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem and Resource Tradeoffs for Simulating Quantum Channels” which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 2926–2959, May 2014. In 2018, Shor received the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, for Outstanding Contributions to Communications Technology. He also received the 2018 Micius Quantum Prize in April 2019. In May 2022, Shor was named the recipient of MIT’s 2022-2023 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the Institute faculty can bestow upon one of its members each academic year. The award citation credits Peter’s “seminal contributions that have forever shaped the foundations of quantum computing. Indeed, quantum computing exists today, in practice, because of Peter Shor.” As of 2020, Shor is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2022 Fellow of the AMS.
Photo credit: Christopher Harting, MIT News | |||||
2453 | dbpedia | 1 | 15 | https://quantumfrontiers.com/2012/07/31/alesha/ | en | Alesha | [
"https://quantumfrontiers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-008_150428_painterlab_eephoto-retouched.jpg",
"https://quantumfrontiers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/scan-kitaev-cropped.jpg?w=584&h=331",
"https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/ec3600c7aebcb13ba238ce2561b6561d889765f26c2cb18bcae734463ebec0cc?s=68&d=ide... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2012-07-31T00:00:00 | In 1997, I had some disposable funding as part of a quantum computing project, and decided to seize the opportunity to bring an interesting visitor to Caltech. But whom to invite? Chris Fuchs, then a postdoc at Caltech who seemed to know everybody working on quantum computing, reported that Richard Jozsa, while attending a conference… | en | https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico | Quantum Frontiers | https://quantumfrontiers.com/2012/07/31/alesha/ | In 1997, I had some disposable funding as part of a quantum computing project, and decided to seize the opportunity to bring an interesting visitor to Caltech. But whom to invite? Chris Fuchs, then a postdoc at Caltech who seemed to know everybody working on quantum computing, reported that Richard Jozsa, while attending a conference in Japan, had met a remarkable Russian from the Landau Institute named Alexei Kitaev.
Responding to this tip, I found a paper by this Kitaev fellow on the arXiv … and was amazed. Later, Alexei told me the story behind this paper. When Peter Shor discovered the efficient algorithm for factoring numbers on a quantum computer in 1994, Alexei heard rumors about the discovery but was unable to attain a copy of Shor’s paper. So he independently invented his own algorithm, which was in some ways similar to Shor’s, but solved a more general problem!
From reading this paper, I was confident that Kitaev would be an interesting visitor. Having learned (again through Chris) that Charlie Bennett and David DiVincenzo were also interested in meeting Kitaev, we arranged to co-sponsor his trip from Russia, with Kitaev splitting his time in the US between IBM and Caltech.
My expectations were high, but not nearly high enough. On his very first day at Caltech, Kitaev told me to call him “Alyosha” (which I later learned should be spelled “Alesha”), and started explaining one of his most marvelous ideas — using non-abelian anyons for fault-tolerant quantum computing. At that time, non-abelian anyons and fault-tolerant quantum computing were two different topics that I already knew a lot about and found very interesting. Yet it had never occurred to me that these two topics were at all related! By the end of the day I understood the connection and I was hooked.
Over coffee at the Red Door Cafe that afternoon, we bonded over our shared admiration for a visionary paper by Greg Moore and Nick Read about non-abelian anyons in fractional quantum Hall systems, though neither of us fully understood the paper (and I still don’t). Maybe, we mused together, non-abelian anyons are not just a theorist’s dream … It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Kitaev’s idea was simple, obvious, and beautiful (the great ideas are obvious in retrospect, but only in retrospect). Anyons are exotic localized particles in a two-dimensional medium. Kitaev understood that a system supporting anyons has many distinct quantum states with nearly the same energy, yet all of these states look essentially identical when we observe their local properties. That’s just the feature that a quantum system should have for its quantum state to be well protected against the damaging effects of noise. Furthermore, we can process the quantum information stored in this manifold of degenerate states by exchanging the positions of the anyons, thereby operating an intrinsically robust quantum computer. We’ll go more deeply into the status of this idea, and its prospects for experimental realization, in later posts.
While Alexei Kitaev was studying physics at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology in the mid-1980s, another physics student named Yuri Milner was studying at nearby Moscow State University. Yet they never met until Yuri called to inform Alexei that he had been selected as a recipient of the newly established Fundamental Physics Prize.Yuri hopes that this prize will draw greater attention to the excitement and value of basic science, and inspire young people to pursue scientific careers.
All of this year’s recipients are brilliant scientists with spectacular accomplishments. Congratulations to them all, but especially, congratulations Alesha! | ||||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 9 | https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47147 | en | American Institute of Physics | https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico | https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico | [
"https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aip-logo-180.png",
"https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2022-03/Preskill%20Credit%20Lance%20Hayashida%20-%20Caltech.jpg?itok=zmESsFP0",
"https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/aip-logo-fullname-400.png",
"https://www.aip... | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | 2022-03-29T10:05:23-04:00 | Zierler: OK, this is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is February 26, 2021. I am so happy to be here with Professor John Preskill. John, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining me. Preskill: Well, I'm glad to do it, David. Zierler: To start, would you please tell me your titles and institutional affiliations? And you'll notice I pluralize everything because I know you have more than one. | en | /sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico | https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47147 | Zierler:
OK, this is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is February 26, 2021. I am so happy to be here with Professor John Preskill. John, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining me.
Preskill:
Well, I'm glad to do it, David.
Zierler:
To start, would you please tell me your titles and institutional affiliations? And you'll notice I pluralize everything because I know you have more than one.
Preskill:
Oh, OK. Well, I am the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and I'm the Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. And we can leave it at that.
Zierler:
When were you named to the Feynman Chair?
Preskill:
Well, when Kip [Thorne] retired. Actually, the background on that is interesting because the donor endowed the chair around 1990. So there was a lot of discussion at Caltech about how we would make use of the leverage of being able to offer the Feynman Chair in Theoretical Physics to someone. And Kip and I actually went on a secret mission to Cambridge to offer it to Stephen Hawking in 1991.
Zierler:
Oh, wow. I did not know that.
Preskill:
Yeah. And so, he was very polite. Of course, he already was the Lucasian Professor obviously. So, the upshot of that was that Stephen didn't accept the Feynman Chair, but he did agree to make regular visits to Caltech. Which he did for many years. He would come for a variable amount of time, typically a month or six weeks in the depths of the Cambridge winter and enjoy the California sunshine. But then, Kip wound up being the Feynman Chair. And I guess I'd have to look up when he retired. It was probably about ten years ago. And I became the Feynman Chair at that point.
Zierler:
Is it known who the donor was back in 1990? Or is that anonymous?
Preskill:
I think I can say. Actually, it's an interesting fellow who's still with us. Mike Scott is his name. And he was, at one time in the early days, the CEO of Apple Computer. When Steve Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer, and they wanted to produce the Apple II, they needed to raise capital, and their investors insisted that they bring in someone with business experience to help manage the company, and that was Mike Scott, who was at Apple for just a few years and had other interesting experiences in his career. But the connection with Feynman is that Mike Scott was a Caltech alum who was among the class that attended the Feynman lectures at ‘61-‘62, ‘62-‘63, the whole two-year sequence. And like many of the students who attended, he was profoundly impressed by that experience. And I think that's what induced him to endow a chair in Feynman's honor.
Zierler:
John, you knew Feynman, and Feynman being who he was, what did it mean for you when you were named with this honor?
Preskill:
Well, it gives you a sense of impostor syndrome, right? Who can live up to that title? But I guess I just shrug it off and carry on.
Zierler:
[laugh] Tell me about the origins of IQIM, the Institute.
Preskill:
Well, of course, I started out my career doing particle physics and with occasional forays into cosmology. So the backstory of IQIM is, I made a mid-career shift in research interests in the mid-1990s. And that happened around 1994, when I learned about Peter Shor's factoring algorithm. But I was primed, I think, to get interested in the subject of quantum information and quantum computing for a couple of reasons. One was that just the previous year, the SSC had been canceled. And for my generation of particle physicists, this was really a terrible blow because we had come along a little bit too late to participate in erecting the Standard Model. I started graduate school in 1975, and so, there was still controversy about what the right electroweak model was at that stage. But the J/psi had been discovered the year before, all the great stuff had been done. Not that there wasn't still a lot of interesting particle physics to do.
But our big hope for beyond the Standard Model physics, we were going to be the generation that would unravel the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking and all the new physics associated with it, and the SSC was going to be the source of the rich phenomenology that we thought we were going to mine as theorists to probe more deeply into nature's secrets. And when the SSC was canceled for complicated political reasons, even though they had already been digging the tunnel in Texas and had sunk a couple of billion dollars in it, one realized it was going to be quite a while before we were going to have the experimental input that we needed to really understand what was going on with physics beyond the Standard Model, which it was generally believed would be discovered when we got up to those energies. And so, I was sort of in a mood to think about different things.
And in fact, while I was sort of waiting, as many of us were, for the SSC to come along, I had already been doing things which were not very phenomenological, like thinking about black holes and how they process information. So, I had sort of become acquainted with principles of quantum information—which were not so widely known by physicists except for a small community—just because I thought that might be useful for understanding what's going on with black holes. And when Shor discovered this factoring algorithm, about a month later Artur Ekert, who was a pioneer of quantum cryptography, visited Caltech and gave a talk. And he mentioned this recent breakthrough that Shor had discovered that you could efficiently factor with quantum computers. And it's possible I've embellished the memory in hindsight, but I was quite amazed by this.
Feynman had been interested in quantum computing, and I knew that. And I wasn't very impressed by the whole subject. I didn't quite see the point of it. But I realized with the discovery of Shor's algorithm that it really meant there was a big difference between what problems we'd be able to solve and which ones we'd never be able to solve with computing technology because it's a quantum world instead of a classical one. Things became possible thanks to quantum mechanics that just wouldn't be possible in a different type of physical world. And I still think that's one of the most amazing things we've ever learned about quantum physics, the difference between quantum and classical. Sorry, I'm giving a rather longwinded answer to your question.
Zierler:
No, this is the intellectual origins of the Institute.
Preskill:
Correct. And so, I had a colleague at Caltech, Jeff Kimble, still at Caltech, and he was also quite excited about this surge of interest in quantum computing. He was a quantum optics guy. And he had made experimental advances in squeezing states of light and using them for metrology and stuff. But it's different now. Atomic Molecular Optic physics is widely recognized by most physicists as an intellectually rich and exciting field. And that's happened largely, I think, in the last 25 years, because of the connections with quantum computing and because of the connections with condensed matter, the possibility of simulating interesting states of quantum matter using these AMO systems. But back then, there was sort of a feeling in the quantum optics community that they didn't get respect because, from the perspective or somebody like me, what was the point, you know? As a particle physicist, I was trying to understand new laws of nature. But what can you do with quantum optics in the lab that you couldn't just figure out with pencil and paper what was going to happen?
And quantum computing, at least in principle, kind of changed that. Because I think it drove home that you should be able to do experiments where you're learning something from the experiment that you couldn't just simulate or calculate. And so, Jeff would have to say himself what got him excited, but I think he realized he had experimental tools that were very relevant to exploring quantum information. And I got excited from the theory perspective and wanted to learn more about what was experimentally possible. So, we formed what we called the Quantum Computing Club at the time, and we started having joint group meetings. And so, I learned some things. I've never been deeply knowledgeable, really, about how experiments work, but I learned a lot more than I had known about what you could do with quantum optics tools. And meanwhile, I was trying to understand whether you could protect quantum computers from noise, which led to the development of the idea of quantum error correction.
But actually, we wound up getting a DARPA grant. This was kind of interesting. The Department of Defense agencies had an immediate interest in quantum computing after Shor's algorithm because of the applications to cryptology. And they were the early supporters of the research in the field. Including the development of experimental tools. And DARPA, in particular, put out a call, and we submitted a proposal, and we got funded for a project which we called QUIC. I guess it was Quantum Information and Computation, but QUIC for short. And there were five PIs, and that helped Jeff do his first teleportation experiment in the lab, and I worked on quantum error correction ideas, and stuff like that. It was a five-year award, and after two years, they cut it. There was a new program manager. This was, I learned, not unprecedented for DARPA --- a new program manager comes in, and what you think is a multi-year commitment turns out not to be.
But I had learned something under Jeff's tutelage, that with money, you can do things. As a theorist and particle physicist, I had it pretty easy as far as funding a group because at Caltech, we had this big DOE high energy physics umbrella grant, which was mostly for experimentalists, and the theorists were a little pimple on it. And that was enough for us to support post-docs and so on. And we also had Caltech funding for theoretical physics post-docs, which helped a lot. But when we had this DARPA funding, I was, for example, able to bring in Alexei Kitaev as a year-long visitor and pay him a salary. I'd never had the resources to do that sort of thing. So that was kind of an eye opener for me.
In my naivete, I'd never worried much about raising money, and applying for grants, and stuff because I sort of had it made with this DOE grant, which was always renewed time after time. But then, with Jeff's encouragement, we applied for a quantum computing center. Actually, NSF started to show an interest in quantum information in the late ‘90s, and they asked a group of us, including me, to organize a workshop because that's how they do things, which took place in the fall of 1999. These were the waning days of the Clinton Administration. And the conventional wisdom at the time was that, partly due to Al Gore's influence, NSF got a surge of funding for a program they called Information Technology Research, which included a lot of practical things, but also sort of a lunatic fringe of blue sky research. And that's what we were part of.
We applied to this ITR program, and we asked for a big center, which would encompass experiment and theory. And the NSF program manager involved, a guy named Mike Foster, said he wasn't interested in the experiment, only in the theory. So we wound up getting a million dollars a year just for a theory institute. This was in the fall of 2000, which was the Institute for Quantum Information. There was no Matter then, just a theory institute. But the timing was great because there were all these young people who were excited about the field, who were getting PhDs. We were able to build a group of really strong post-docs and attract Caltech students into research in that area. And we could pretty much get any outstanding post-doc we wanted because there wasn't so much competition then. There's a lot more now. So, we had an amazing group of young people in the early 2000s who came through, many of whom are leaders of research in quantum information now, like Patrick Hayden, and Guifré Vidal, and Frank Verstraete, and quite a few others.
Zierler:
Today, of course, there are several centers that have a similar research focus. But at the time, there were not, of course. You were really at the vanguard of all of this. So, the question is, what was your model? What other centers were out there that you might have used to base your ideas on…on where this ultimately would develop?
Preskill:
Well, actually, my model was the experience that I had with the particle theory group, which I didn't appreciate immediately was a bit culturally different than most research efforts in AMO physics and what was then the nascent interest in quantum information—which was I wanted to bring in the best young scientists and give them a lot of freedom, to create a community of people who had some common interests, but also complementary backgrounds. So, I deliberately would put a computer scientist in the same office with a physicist so those guys would talk. And I guess that was the model. Now, the Institute, the next one which had a big investment, was the Perimeter Institute. When it was founded, they saw quantum information as a core part of their mission. And then, later, there was another institute at Waterloo, The Institute for Quantum Computing, which had a lot of resources, all thanks to Mike Lazaridis, and the Canadian government, and government of Ontario.
But we got off to such a quick start, and we already had a track record of bringing in great people who did great research while they were at Caltech, and then went on to later career success. And we were able to continue to recruit the best young people very successfully. The first thing I did with the IQI funding is, we hired Alexei Kitaev. This is interesting, too. When I got that DARPA money, I thought, “Hey, I could bring in a long-term visitor with this funding. So, who should that be?” And so, I asked a few colleagues for suggestions. And indirectly, I heard from Richard Joza that he had met this amazing young Russian at a conference. The conference was in Japan. That was Kitaev. And I didn't know much about Kitaev, but he had a paper on the arXiv, which I then read and was blown away by. He had sort of reformulated Shor's algorithm in a more general and powerful way.
And so, I arranged to have him visit in 1997. Actually, the legend about that paper that he wrote is, in 1994 he heard about Shor having discovered that you could factor with a quantum computer. He was at the Landau Institute in Russia. And he wasn't in the in-group that had access to the preprint. It wasn't posted on the arXiv, although the arXiv existed at that time. But it was just kind of circulating around by email. And he wasn't able to get it. So he had to figure it out for himself. Now, it's a huge advantage to know that it's possible, so he had it on good authority that Peter Shor had discovered an algorithm for factoring large numbers efficiently on a quantum computer, and then he figured it out. His approach was different and more general than Shor's. That was the paper I read, his version of what we now call the Hidden Subgroup Problem. He called it the Abelian Stabilizer Problem, and Shor's algorithm fit into that framework.
So, this guy is clearly very interesting. And I arranged it for him to first come for a shorter visit. It was his first time in the US, I think. And the first day that we met and sat down for coffee, he started telling me about this idea he had to use non-Abelian anyons for quantum computing. And here's something funny. I was very interested in non-Abelian anyons. That was one of the things I was fooling around with waiting for the SSC to turn on. Non-Abelian anyons are particles in a two-dimensional medium which have exotic statistics, more general than bosons or fermions. And non-Abelian means that you can actually have a state of many of these particles be modified just by braiding them around one another.
And what Kitaev had realized is that this was an approach to quantum computing that would be resistant to noise because it was topological. The effect of exchanging a pair of these anyons, because the information is encoded in a very, very nonlocal way, the environment buffeting the system locally doesn't interfere with it. This was a very brilliant idea. And I understood it immediately after 15 minutes of taking about it over coffee because I knew about non-Abelian anyons, and I was very interested in quantum error correction. And it had never occurred to me that these two things that I was very interested in were related. And I guess that shows that I'm not Kitaev.
Zierler:
But you can spot a Kitaev when you see one.
Preskill:
Well, that's true, and I was ahead of my time in that regard. He was underappreciated for sure in 1997. And so, he came back the next year supported by this DARPA grant as a visiting professor. And we actually jointly taught a course on quantum computing. And then, when we got the NSF award in 2000, the first thing I tried to do was hire him. Of course, I couldn't hire him as a professor by myself. That had to go through the usual Caltech hiring process. But I could hire him, although it had to be approved by a committee, as what we called at the time a senior research associate. Now, we call it a research professor. It's a position that we have at Caltech for people who are world-leading researchers with stature comparable to a tenured professor, but it's a soft money position, and it's paid out of a grant. No teaching responsibilities.
Zierler:
This is what Sean Carroll has, for example.
Preskill:
That's what Sean has. And that's what John Schwarz had, actually, when I first came to Caltech. That's another story, speaking of someone who was underappreciated for a while. Yeah. And so, we had Kitaev, and we had this amazing group of young people. And then, a lot of students came through and trained. I think probably in terms of impact on science, leading the IQI and establishing it is the most impactful thing I've done when you look at all the people who came through and how they've become scientific leaders. But anyway, to come around to answering your question, for ten years, we were just the IQI, and we went through several cycles of renewal at NSF. And Jeff spearheaded this. I wouldn't have thought to request a grant to start a theory institute if Jeff Kimble hadn't been pushing me, so I'm grateful to him for that.
And in 2010, we applied for the Physics Frontier Center program at NSF, very competitive thing. There are ten of them in the country in different areas of physics. And that turned out to be successful, and as a result, what had been the IQI expanded to a larger center that did encompass both theory and experiment, pretty much as we had envisioned back when we originally proposed it in 2000. We had something like that in mind, but NSF at that time said, “We only want the theory.” But in 2011 we became the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. And now, that's been around for almost ten years, since 2011, and has been very successful.
Zierler:
John, that's a great overview of your current titles and affiliations. So before we take it all the way back and develop your personal history, I'd like to ask a very in-the-moment question. As you say, of course, we're all working from our home offices now. As a theoretical physicist, I wonder if in some ways, these past 11 months have been more productive for you because the social and physical isolation perhaps has given you a bit more headspace or bandwidth to work on some equations or problems that you might otherwise not have. On the other hand, I wonder if your style as a scientist really depends on in-person, interpersonal interaction, and in many ways, your research agenda has suffered as a result.
Preskill:
Well, as the question suggests, it's a complicated issue with tradeoffs. One big change for me is I was traveling a lot. And I get, of course, as we all do, lots of invitations, most of which I turn down. But for opportunities to lecture, attend conferences, and things like that, there were a certain number of them which I really thought I had to accept. So the last couple of years, I had been making lots of trips. And it was really a bit of a relief to put a stop to that for a while and not be chasing around so much.
On the other hand, the kinds of interactions you have when you visit other places to attend a conference or give a talk and so on, the kinds of informal interactions, those are not very well simulated in the Zoom era, although there are various attempts to do that. And so, you do miss that kind of thing where you go to dinner or lunch and just chat. And sometimes, that's a good way of probing questions and coming up with ideas. So, I think we've all suffered a bit from missing that kind of interaction.
In my group, it hasn't been too bad. We have our group meetings on Zoom, and I'm able to keep up with what students and post-docs are doing, and so on. But I think it's hard for the new students. They can attend meetings and stuff like that, but it's hard to become sort of integrated into the community in our online existence compared to when we're able to hang around and chat in our offices or at a coffee break. But in response to your question, yeah, I think I have had a bit more time for reflection than was the case, say, in the previous couple of years, and that has been helpful. And it's also given me a little more time, maybe, for reading and catching up on things.
One thing that I had been increasingly feeling was missing from my education or knowledge base was the students are more and more interested in machine learning, and I really just didn't know much about it. And I still know only a limited amount about it. But I did take some time to read textbooks and papers, and I also am collaborating with some students who know a lot more about machine learning than I do. And so, that's been a plus over the last year.
It's interesting with the experimentalists. They seem to be much more challenged than we are as theorists. Some of the labs were closed down for a while. Now, they're operating under socially distanced protocols, and that slows things down. But I've also had several experimentalists tell me that they're getting the best data ever because the lab is so quiet. There's nobody walking around, people aren't opening and shutting doors. And a lot of experiments are operating remotely or with minimal physical presence in the lab of group members, and that's had some benefits. So, it's not all bad, even for the experimentalists.
Zierler:
The big question going forward, what are the best aspects of the current dynamic that you plan to continue using once we're out of the pandemic?
Preskill:
Well, I don't know. I think the model of doing seminars and conferences online will have a place going forward. Like I said, it's not really the same in terms of the personal interactions as a face-to-face conference. But it's still pretty effective. So, I've attended workshops, and, of course, things get recorded, so you can watch them later. That was happening anyway. Usually, when there was an event, people were making videos. But since it's just not feasible to travel to all the things that one wants to attend, having that option of participating in a meeting with people all over the world is something we'll probably take advantage of more than we have in the past, going forward.
Zierler:
Well, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Tell me about your parents and where they're from.
Preskill:
I grew up in Chicago. My dad, Alfred Preskill, his parents were Eastern European Jews, his mom from Latvia, his dad from Lithuania. And like many Jews, they came to the United States in the 1880s or 1890s. In the case of my grandfather, he and his brothers would've been drafted into the Tsar's army if they had stuck around in Lithuania. That was one of the incentives for leaving. And they all came to Chicago. And that's where my grandfather met my grandmother.
Zierler:
I assume Preskill is an Anglicized name.
Preskill:
Well, according to family folklore, in Lithuania, it had a similar sound. And I've sometimes pondered whether it's related to names like Peskin and Peshkin. But we think in Lithuania, they were saying it more or less the way I do as Preskill. And there are several alternative spellings that were adopted when people immigrated. So, there are some Preskills still around the Chicago area, but there are also other spellings, like Preaskil. So anyway, my grandfather's business that he started was a harness shop. He would make the rig that you would use to attach your horse to your buggy. But when automobiles came in, he realized that wasn't a good business model, so he opened a hardware store. And when my dad was a kid, he used to work in the hardware store. So even in later life, he considered himself to be an expert on tools.
And my mom has a rather different origin story. She actually converted to Judaism when she married my father, and then later in life, she actually got bat mitzvahed. Much later in life. But she did not grow up Jewish. She grew up in Cleveland. Her father was a lawyer, and his family had been, for many generations, farmers. And my mom's mother also came from a family that had been farming in Pennsylvania and Ohio for many generations. We think they go back to before the American Revolution in Pennsylvania. But when my mom was a kid, she would work in my grandfather's law office. He was a probate lawyer, did wills. And very successful in the sense that he was very highly regarded in his profession. He wrote a textbook on Ohio probate law that was widely used and had some high-level connections.
One of the famous family stories is my mom, as a teenage girl, was working the switchboard in the office, and she cut off the Vice President of the United States by pulling the plug while he was talking to my grandfather. She wound up going to law school, and it was pretty unusual for women to attend law school. She was the only one in her class at what was then called Western Reserve, now Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. And I think she might've gone into practice with my grandfather. But then, World War II came.
And going back to my dad for a minute, he wound up going to the University of Chicago. He was very good student. He graduated high school at 16, and he graduated law school at 20. At the University of Chicago, he was able to get a bachelor's degree and a law degree more or less concurrently. And that was 1932. It was the Depression. Nobody wanted to hang around in school. Everybody had to go out and earn a living if you could get a job. So, he was in a big hurry. Because he was 20, he couldn't take the bar exam because he was still a minor. He had to wait til he was 21. And he passed the bar exam and worked for a law firm for a while. But when the war came, he was 4F because of a medical condition. He was about 30 then, but he couldn't enlist.
So, the way he did public service was he became a federal employee. He moved to Baltimore and worked for what was then called the Federal Security Agency, which was setting the legal foundations for the Social Security system, which was still sort of being fleshed out. And that's where he met my mom. When the war came, she also thought she should work for the government, and they wound up in Baltimore. The reason they were in Baltimore is a lot of the federal agencies moved out of DC because that was being taken over for military purposes. And that's where they met. They were both lawyers in the same office, and they got married 1944 and moved back to Chicago.
My mom did give up the law when she had her first child, my older brother David, in 1947. But she was really a remarkably capable woman. And so, she volunteered for everything. She was the President of the PTA, the League of Women Voters, and a local philanthropic organization. And she learned Sign Language so she could work with the deaf, and she worked with kids with Cerebral Palsy, and she volunteered in the hospital, and as a tutor at the high school. She was really a dynamo and has a very different personality than me—I'm quite introverted, she was very extroverted.
Zierler:
I wonder, as a product of her generation, if her decision to leave law was because that was sort of externally expected of her. In other words, in latter generations, the same person would not have done that.
Preskill:
I think that's right.
Zierler:
Did she ever express regret or frustration with that?
Preskill:
Not to me. And like I said, she managed to have a lot of impact outside the home in quite a number of ways. She was pretty amazing in that respect. My dad started to think the law was boring, so he joined a business called Allied Radio, which my uncle was involved in. And he worked there for over 20 years in marketing, became the VP of marketing. So one of the ways that impacted me was he would bring home these kits. Allied Radio made what were called Knight Kits you could assemble yourself with a soldering iron—radios, and walkie-talkies, a photoelectric relay, and things like that. So that was my introduction to electronics, starting when I was around 10. I really enjoyed putting those things together. And I was surprisingly uncurious about how they worked, actually. I built radios, and I was very proud that I was able to break the iron curtain and hear a broadcast in Russia on a shortwave radio, but I didn't really understand what the tuning coil, and the capacitors, and the resistors were doing. I just thought it was fun to put them together.
Zierler:
Growing up, how Jewishly connected was your family? Particularly with your mom, was she more interested in doing stuff than your dad in certain regards?
Preskill:
My dad was the more interested one, and we belonged to a reform congregation on the North Shore of Chicago. We moved to Highland Park, one of the northern suburbs. Or they did, before the first child was born. And we belonged to this huge congregation called North Shore Congregation Israel with over 1,000 families. And he was involved in the temple one way or another at various times in his life. He was the Chair of the Board of Religious Education there for a while.
And later, actually, after he retired he was very interested in studying Torah, and Talmud, and stuff like that with classes that the rabbi would lead. My dad was quite scholarly—I think he might have been an academic if he hadn’t come of age during the Depression. And my brothers and I went to religious school. It was usually on Sunday, actually. Reform Judaism. And you could be bar mitzvahed. I chose not to be 'cause I wasn't too keen on the idea of having to go to Hebrew school after school from 3rd grade through 7th grade. And my parents said that was OK if I didn't want to.
But I did get involved. I became, actually, when I was in high school, the audio-visual supervisor at the Temple. And so, one of my responsibilities was to make sure that the rabbi's sermons were recorded at every Friday night service. I had a crew of volunteers who would sign up. And if something went wrong, and we failed to record the sermon, the rabbi was not pleased. So, there was a little pressure there. And then, at the religious school, as the supervisor of audio-visual activities, we used to show movies sometimes, so we had to thread the projector. And that was also a bit stressful because every once in a while, the film would break, and you'd have to do emergency film repair with some magic tape or something. But that was my most active role in my youth at the Temple.
Zierler:
John, you went to public schools throughout your childhood?
Preskill:
Highland Park High School. Highland Park public school all the way in the town we lived in. It was a good school system. And there were a lot of Jewish kids in the community. We had a tracking system, which was a pretty common practice back then, where for each discipline, they would put the kids in—I don't actually know how they decided this—level 1 English, level 2, and level 3. And the level 1 would feed into the AP classes. And so, even though it was a big school, there were over 2,000 students, if you were in those level 1 classes, it was the same kids you'd see in most of your classes year after year.
Zierler:
Was stuff like the space race, the moon landing, formative to your development as a kid?
Preskill:
Hugely, yes. I still remember vividly, or at least I think I do, my dad bringing home a newspaper in early 1961. It was the Daily News, the afternoon newspaper in Chicago, with this huge headline, a couple inches high: “Russian First Space Man.” Yuri Gagarin was orbiting the Earth. And it was a huge deal. Of course, the US had a space program, too. The Mercury astronauts had been chosen, and they were training, and the Russians kind of beat us to the punch with Yuri Gagarin's first flight. And Alan Shepard's first flight was a month later or so, I don't remember exactly. But those Mercury astronauts were heroes. Whenever there was a flight, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and so on, it was a huge national event. And it seemed like the world came to a standstill, and we were holding our breath while these guys were flying into space and managing to return to the Earth.
And, of course, in those days, there were three TV networks, and they all had news organizations. And they'd all stop regular programming so they could cover these missions. And so, I ate everything up. I read everything I could. So [in] 1961, I was 8 years old. But I could go to the library and get a book about rockets. And there'd be a feature story in TIME magazine or whatever, lots of newspaper coverage, and I'd read all that stuff. I wanted to know everything about how Mercury was going to lead to Gemini, which was going to lead to Apollo. And so, I very avidly followed all that, and I think it did have a significant role in awakening my interest in science.
Zierler:
John, were politics a topic of discussion at the dinner table as a kid? Would you have known if your parents were voting for Nixon or Kennedy?
Preskill:
I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debate, as a matter of fact. I don't remember my dad being there, but my mom was. And they were Democrats. Well, I shouldn't say that. My mom always identified as an independent. She always said she'd vote for the best candidate. Usually, it was a Democrat, but not always. And things were a little less polarized then than now. So the idea that you could, in a given year, prefer the candidate of one party, which was different than that of the previous election, did not seem wildly unlikely.
Zierler:
In middle school or high school, were there any standout math or science teachers who exerted a real influence on you?
Preskill:
Well, there was one in high school. His name was Donald Ens. He was a math teacher. He was a young guy. There was an English teacher, too, who I admired a lot. But the thing about Mr. Ens was he really loved math. And at that time—after a few years of being very interested in space, and rockets, and then chemistry—I had a chemistry lab, and building the radios and stuff, I decided really, the coolest thing was math. And the thing I loved the most in the reading I did was Gödel's Theorem. The idea that there were limits to what we could prove or what we could know is true in mathematics. That really impressed me. And Mr. Ens loved that kind of stuff, too. So, I had somebody I could talk to about those sorts of things.
And in fact, when I was thinking about where to go to college, I had some rather funny notions, and one was that if you wanted to do math, Princeton was the place to be. And I'm not sure what that was based on, maybe because Einstein had been there or something. But that was firmly implanted in my head. And another idea I had was that you shouldn't go to Harvard. Because I had a friend whose older brother went to Harvard and majored in biochemistry. And when he'd come back from college, he'd always complain that all the classes were taught by graduate students. And they had all these famous professors, but you never saw them. So I thought, “Well, that doesn't sound good.”
At least Princeton claimed to be a more undergraduate-focused institution. So that's where I decided I wanted to go, and indeed, where I went. And when I went to Princeton, I was thinking I'd major in math. I talked my way into a graduate-level course on Set Theory and Logic my freshman year taught by a guy named Dana Scott, who was a distinguished logician and philosopher. And I had to get permission from the guidance office, and I had to pass out of freshman English, and stuff. I was very insistent that I had to take this class because this was going to be my future, Set Theory and Logic. And I wasn't sure if Dana Scott would be teaching it again. And it was a fun class.
Zierler:
John, this was a pure math environment, not an applied math environment?
Preskill:
That's right. But I realized, by the end of my freshman year, several things. One of them, I think, I'd known all along. I'm just not cut out intellectually to be a mathematician. I'm just not good enough at that kind of thing. Meanwhile, I was taking freshman physics, and in the spring term, we used this book by Purcell, Electricity and Magnetism, which is a great book, and it's still used in some places. And that really impressed me because I was learning in my math class calculus on manifolds, and about differential forms, and things like that. It was all very abstract, and very beautiful and fun. But no hint of what it was good for.
Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. But certainly, the emphasis was not on what you do with this stuff. But then, in Electricity and Magnetism, learning Maxwell's equations, and why you would want to take the curl or divergence of a vector field for some useful purpose, the fact that I could piece those two things together, this very abstract math and then this physics class, which was making use of those concepts, that made me appreciate that maybe physics was a more natural home for me.
Zierler:
Did you sense, even as an undergraduate, the hierarchy of theory above experimentation in those days?
Preskill:
Yeah, and in fact, even back in high school, I had this very snooty attitude that theorists were somehow superior. I was terrible, looking back. I thought that the intellectual pinnacle was to do theory, and that experiment just didn't appeal to me personally, let's put it that way. And so, maybe I had a perspective, which, of course, is completely wrong, that experiment was not the best route to a deep understanding of the secrets of nature, that thinking would do that. It's completely wrong. But I really did have that attitude.
Zierler:
Can you either affirm or deny the famous quote attributed to Wightman that he referred to the experimentalists as “the help?”
Preskill:
Arthur Wightman said that?
Zierler:
Allegedly.
Preskill:
He was my senior thesis advisor.
Zierler:
That's right.
Preskill:
“The help.” Well, I'm not sure I knew that. He was a wonderful man, but I'm surprised he would say that.
Zierler:
It may be apocryphal, I don't know.
Preskill:
Although, of course, he was a mathematical physicist and proved theorems, when he was young he did more practical things. He worked out details like how ionizing radiation deposits energy in materials and things like that. So, he had some appreciation for that type of knowledge building. Actually, another college teacher who had a big impact on me was John Wheeler. My sophomore year, he taught a class that I took for the whole year, covered everything in physics. We called it Honors Physics. And we did classical mechanics, and E&M, and stat mech, and quantum physics, and waves all in one year. And it was a very idiosyncratic course, to put it mildly.
Of course, to us undergraduates, there was something kind of god-like about Wheeler. So, this was 1972. The thought that he had worked with Niels Bohr seemed unimaginable --- that anyone could be that old. He was 61 at the time. Here, I'm 68, so it doesn't seem so old now, but at the time, it sure did. And he always came to class in a suit and tie, and that also made him seem like a denizen from another generation. And, of course, he had this marvelous ability to use the blackboard to draw intricate illustrations on the spot. But the thing that was most memorable is–here's what he did on the first day of class, or at least how I remember it. We're going to do classical mechanics. We're going to use Goldstein. We're going to learn Lagrangian Mechanics. And we're going to learn Hamiltonian Mechanics from this book. And I'd already dipped into the book a little, I was excited.
And so, I figured he was going to tell us about the calculus of variations, and the Euler-Lagrange Equations, and stuff. I kind of had a hint what that was about. But he comes in, and he goes up to the board, and he draws A on the board and B. And then, he draws a line going from A to B. And he said, “An electron is going to travel from A to B. How does it know how to go? What path should it take? Well, of course, it takes all the paths. It adds them all together with an E to the iS …” “What?” He was trying to explain that what we were learning was the classical limit of quantum theory. Although Goldstein wasn't saying it that way, he thought it was important for us to know right from the start that that was the context, and that you could understand why this calculus of variations stuff was relevant by thinking about how the phase when it's stationary would add up constructively.
Of course, this is a wonderful insight coming from Feynman, who was Wheeler's student. And I thought this was great. I just was dazzled. And a lot of students, understandably, were a bit upset because then, we had to do the homework problems in Goldstein, which said, “Here's a couple of springs and a mass. Write down the Lagrangian.” What were we supposed to say? “Well, the mass is going to follow all the paths. Add them up with an E to the iS.” That didn't really help you do the homework. But Wheeler was inspiring.
Zierler:
This obviously planted a seed in you later on.
Preskill:
It did. And here's another thing he said, which I never forgot. And this was later in the year. He came into class, and he told everyone to take out a piece of paper. He said, “I want you to write down, on your piece of paper, all of the equations of physics. Everything that one needs to know in order to derive everything else in the world.” I don't know how much time we had, a few minutes. You could write down the Maxwell Equation and the Schrödinger Equation. Fluid mechanics. Maybe the definition of entropy, and so on. And then, he collected all the papers. And he put them on a table in the front of the room, and he said, “Here on the table are all the equations of physics.” And then, he said, “Fly.” And he's talking to the equations. “Fly.” Nothing happened. The papers just sat there. And he said, “What went wrong? Here are all the equations of physics, but they won't fly. Yet, the universe flies.” That was Wheeler. [laugh]
Zierler:
On the social side of things, you may have heard the quip that at Princeton, the 60s came in the early 1970s. It was a little later to the game than places like Harvard or Berkeley. Were you political at all? Were you involved in any of the anti-war protests or Civil Rights things that were going on at campus in those days?
Preskill:
I participated, but rather passively. I guess it was before I was in college in 1970 was when a lot of campuses shut down after the invasion of Cambodia. I was in high school then. When I was at Princeton, there were some anti-war protests, and I would attend, sometimes with my friends. But it was not something that I devoted much of my time or my mindfulness to. I was pretty focused.
Zierler:
Was the draft something you needed to contend with?
Preskill:
Well, yeah. So, by that time, there was a lottery. And there would be an event where they would, on national television, take balls out of an urn, and it was based on your birthday. So, you would get a number for each date of the calendar year, and if you had a high number attached to your birthdate, then you were unlikely to be called. And if you had a low number, there was a serious possibility of being called. And I had a high number, January 19. My number was over 300. So, I knew it was pretty clear I didn't have to worry about being drafted.
Zierler:
Was a senior thesis at Princeton standard? Or was that an above and beyond kind of thing for you?
Preskill:
Every Princeton student does it. So, it's a big deal. You spend a lot of your senior year doing it. Actually, there were junior papers as well that I think everyone had to do. In physics, we had to do one the first term and second term. And actually, looking back, maybe this was sort of formative as well. So, you're a junior, you don't have any idea what to do for a research project. You're supposed to knock on doors and talk to faculty, see if they have suggestions, say you're interested in working on something. “What do you propose?” And so, I don't know why, I guess maybe I was assigned to him, I went to see Marc Davis who's a cosmologist, he's been at Berkeley for many years now, but he was at Princeton then. And so, he asked me what I was interested in. And what I said was, I was interested in the interpretation of quantum theory. And he said, “Well, you know what --- you might be interested in is the EPR Paradox,” which I had never heard of.
And so, he explained a little about what it was. He didn't really know. But that piqued my curiosity, and it turned out that there was a new instructor who had just arrived at Princeton that year named Stuart Freedman, and he had just done an experiment with John Clauser to test the Bell Inequality. And so, I went to him and asked him to fill me in a little bit about that. And he said something that stuck, which I thought was really weird. He had done the experiment with Clauser, which seemed to confirm violation of the Bell Inequality. But there was a competing experiment that had found a different result, that the Bell Inequality was satisfied, so the idea of local realism seemed to be confirmed by that competing experiment, which was done by a Russian group. And I said, “Well, how do you account for the discrepancy?” And he didn't give a scientific answer, he gave a political one, which was, “Well, it has to do with dialectical materialism. So, there's a bias in favor of local realism.” I thought, “Boy, could that really be it?” Anyway, it just kind of shocked me that he said that.
So I wound up reading up on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper and other papers, and I wrote my JP on that. That's what we called junior paper, JP. And I didn't really think much more about that stuff for some time. But then, when I came back to quantum information, of course, a lot of it was about entanglement. So maybe having had that experience in my formative years helped make me receptive to those kinds of ideas, I don't know.
But in the case of the senior thesis, again, the onus is on the student to find an advisor. And I had had an experience I guess late in my junior year. I used to go to the bookstore, the Princeton U Store, where there were various physics books on display, and I'd browse through them. Every once in a while, I'd buy one. And I found this book by Streater and Wightman, which was called PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That. And I thought that was a very charming title. And so, I started browsing through it, and having still a sort of mathematical predilection, it appealed to me that there was rigorous mathematics about Quantum Field Theory. And I thought, “Boy, if I really want to understand Quantum Field Theory, I should understand what all this is about.”
And I decided I would ask Arthur Wightman to be my thesis advisor. But then, a kind of really embarrassing thing happened. I won an award that fall at the beginning of my senior year because I had the highest academic standing in my class. And the President of Princeton in the opening ceremony presented this award, and we chatted a little. And he asked me, “Who are you going to do your thesis with?” And I said, “Oh, I'm planning to do it with Arthur Wightman.” But at this point, I'd never spoken to Wightman, he had no idea who I was. You know how it is with professors, they're hard to catch. So I went to his class, and I went up to talk to him after class. And I told him who I was, and he says, “Oh, yeah, I've heard about you from a surprising source.” He had talked to President Bowen who had said, “Oh, I talked to this guy Preskill who's going to do a thesis with you,” and Wightman had said, “What?” So that was pretty humiliating. But because Arthur Wightman was such a sweet man, I didn't stay embarrassed for long.
And looking back, he spent an extraordinary amount of time with me that year. And I had sort of a typical undergraduate’s sense of entitlement. Whenever I saw him in his office, I figured I could barge in and start asking questions. And he never turned me away that I recall. He had sort of a gift for making you feel at ease, like he was really enjoying talking to you. At least I always felt that way. You know how sometimes people wish you'd go away, you can tell, even if they don't come right out and say it. But he was never like that.
Zierler:
In many ways, a senior thesis is a tryout for real scholarship later on. And so, with that in mind, I'm curious how parochial your worldview was, or not, given the extraordinary excitement and advance in particle physics in the early 1970s. Were you aware of what Sam Ting was doing? Were you aware of Grand Unification with Glashow and Georgi? Were these things on your radar? Or was your world of physics really confined to Princeton?
Preskill:
Well, I guess it was a little insular. Of course, at Princeton, asymptotic freedom was discovered by Gross and Wilczek while I was there, and also by Politzer at Harvard. But I was not so aware of that. I do remember the J/psi, the so-called November Revolution. I was a senior, and we had a speaker from the SLAC experiment actually, from SPEAR, who, not long after the discovery was announced, described the event. So even the undergraduates, the excitement bubbled down to us about the discovery of the J/psi and a lot of discussion of what it could mean, what it could be. And so, I was aware of that excitement, but I wasn't clued into the latest developments the way you are when you're a graduate student. Not as an undergraduate. I did read, under the tutelage of Arthur Wightman, a paper by Sidney Coleman that I found very remarkable, and that was part of the reason I wanted to go to Harvard. It was the paper by Coleman and Erick Weinberg.
Erick Weinberg had been Sidney's student at Harvard. And this was the paper about spontaneous symmetry breaking driven by radiative corrections. Very beautiful paper, which I studied in detail as an undergraduate and made use of ideas from it in my senior thesis. So that was fairly current. I guess that paper came out in '73, and I was reading it the next year. And I went into that particular paper in some depth. But I don't think I was aware of Grand Unification until I got to Harvard. Although, the original papers appeared when I was a senior in college.
Zierler:
In terms of Wightman's mentorship, did he essentially hand you a thesis problem to work on? Or you more or less came up with it on your own?
Preskill:
He handed it to me, and it was way too hard. Way too hard. It was to prove that spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs in the Yukawa Theory. And I mean prove it in the sense of rigorous mathematics. That’s a problem about one plus one dimensional field theory, but the tools that he wanted me to use had just been developed that year, the Osterwalder-Schrader Axioms for Euclidian Quantum Field Theory. And he believed that those tools would enable one to show that this theory of fermions and scalars would have a phase in which a discrete symmetry was spontaneously broken. And I tried to do that, and I kind of nibbled around the edges but didn't really make much headway towards a proof. The problem wasn't solved for quite some time. Maybe it took another 15 years before it was solved by real mathematicians. So, I really was not very well equipped for it either intellectually or by background, but I learned a lot. And I think most senior theses turned out that way.
Zierler:
What kind of advice did you get, or not, in terms of choosing graduate programs, particular professors to work with?
Preskill:
Well, I did talk to Wightman about that, I recall. Actually, here's something else, though, which maybe is worth mentioning. At that time, the attitude was widespread that if you tried to get a PhD in physics, you'd never get a job. In the ‘60s, there was a surge of hiring sort of in the post-Sputnik building of science. And so, all these young people got hired as professors in theoretical physics in particular, and all the jobs were filled. And it wouldn't be until the late 1990s that they'd start to retire and there'd be an opportunity to get a faculty job again. I heard this all the time, including from faculty when I was an undergraduate of Princeton. “If your goal is to get a PhD in physics and go on in academia, think again. Because there aren't any jobs.” But somehow, although that should've been very discouraging, it wasn't. I'm not really that conceited of a person, I'm well-aware of my limitations, but somehow, I thought, “Well, for me, it'll be different. And if you don't try, how are you going to know?” Didn't bother me so much.
But anyway, Wightman was quite positive about Sidney Coleman in particular as a potential mentor. The other thing, which I got more from talking to other students, was there was this kind of cultural divide at the time between so-called East Coast and West Coast physics. And at least the buzz with the students was, “The exciting stuff is happening at Princeton and Harvard, and Caltech and Berkeley are still doing what they were doing in the ‘60s, and they haven't caught up. What's exciting is gauge theories. And they're still doing S-matrix theory at Berkeley, so you better not go there.”
Zierler:
What about the theory group at SLAC? Was that something you considered?
Preskill:
No, not so much. Who would I have been aware of? Of course, I knew Sid Drell because I had read his textbook.
Zierler:
Bjorken, for example?
Preskill:
Yeah. I don't know. I wasn't too excited about Stanford or SLAC. And at Caltech, the feeling was the glory days were behind. That's what the students were saying in the mid-70s, that Gell-Mann and Feynman were in their declining years. I had one friend who graduated a year ahead of me, good friend, Orlando Alvarez, who had been a Princeton undergrad. And he went to Harvard. I talked to him a lot, and I figured, “Well, if it's good enough for Orlando, that's probably where I should go.” And I was aware of Steve Weinberg. He had been hired at Harvard relatively recently, I think in '73 he had moved from MIT. He was sort of supposed to fill Schwinger's shoes. And I was aware of the Weinberg-Salam Model, so I knew he was supposed to be a big deal.
But to the extent that I did it, reading papers to get an idea of what people were doing or what would be interesting that faculty members at Harvard, for example, were working on-- I was very impressed by Coleman's papers at the time, less so by Weinberg's. A lot of that had to do with Coleman’s style, which was extremely clear and clever. He would use methods that he would explain very brilliantly, and which you might not have thought of yourself.
Zierler:
So Coleman was really the primary motivation for you wanting to go to Harvard?
Preskill:
That's how I recall it. It didn't turn out quite that way because I became Steve Weinberg's student.
Zierler:
Did you have any interactions with Coleman before you got to Harvard? Did he ever come to Princeton? Did you know him personally?
Preskill:
It's funny because he was at Princeton on leave at the time asymptotic freedom was being discovered. But at that time, I guess I was a sophomore. I don't remember interacting with him at all or even being aware he was there. So, I had not met him. I knew him by reputation and by reading his papers. And getting an assurance from Arthur Wightman that he was doing extremely interesting things. And like I said, I was aware that Weinberg was a big shot. I don't know if I was so aware of Glashow when I was an undergrad. But yeah, I decided I wanted to go Harvard, and that's how it turned out. And as a first-year graduate student, I took Sidney's Field Theory course, which was very popular, and the room would be filled to the rafters. In fact, that was the year that videos were made of all the lectures. And those videos were later used as part of the basis for a version of Coleman's Field Theory lectures that were recently published.
And so, those lectures were beautiful. Coleman was a legendary lecturer, always extremely clear and entertaining. But it was the kind of thing where while you were listening, you thought everything was perfectly clear, but then afterward, it would be very hard to remember why it had been so clear. So, I would go over my notes at great length afterwards and try to re-derive everything. Sometimes I would go and watch the videos, actually, with another friend from the class. And I was determined to master whatever he talked about.
So, that was a very memorable experience. There wasn't any other course I took at Harvard that was taught nearly as well, even though they were taught by distinguished people. That same year, I took Weinberg's gravity course based on his book, Gravitation and Cosmology. General Relativity course. I liked the book, but his lectures weren’t very good. It seemed like he would come in unprepared, and then he'd open the book and start copying equations out of it. It was very uninspiring. And Shelly Glashow was not a very good lecturer, either. And you kind of got the impression he was winging it. I remember taking group theory from Shelly. It was fun, but it always seemed like very little preparation had gone into the lecture.
Zierler:
It's been said that pedagogy is much more prized at Princeton than it is at Harvard. I wonder if you had that experience, even though those are very different perspectives as an undergraduate to a graduate student.
Preskill:
Well, no, I've never really thought about it that way. But I guess that does align with my experience. I thought there were some very well-taught classes when I was an undergrad. Actually, I'd mentioned taking that freshman course on electricity and magnetism. I didn't mention the instructor. It was Val Fitch. And, of course, he won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of CP-violation, which I didn't know at the time. But he was an inspiring teacher. And I took another course from him on more advanced so-called modern physics, in which he discussed at great length the K-Kbar system, and flavor mixing, and CP-violation. And I wasn't aware until told by another one of the students that that was his research bread and butter. But he sure seemed to know a lot about it. [laugh] And so, that was another very memorable class.
Zierler:
If Steve Weinberg didn't give you a great impression as a student in his class, how did you end up becoming his student?
Preskill:
Well, everybody wanted to work with Sidney because he could explain things so clearly, and he was receptive to a certain degree to supervising students. But in a way which was only half-joking, I rather vividly remember him saying, “I have graduate students like a dog has fleas.” And, of course, he meant it as a joke, and I actually thought it was funny. But he really had a lot of students, and his personal habits were different than they were in later years. This was before he was married and before he'd been diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. And he was a very heavy smoker and kept unconventional hours. He'd stay up all night and then go to sleep at dawn, and he'd come in in the afternoon. He always insisted that his lectures be scheduled for the afternoon because he would be sleeping in the morning. And when he would arrive in mid-afternoon, sometimes late afternoon, students would be queued up outside his office because they wanted a moment with Sidney. And I just thought, “Who needs it? I've got to stand in line to get a few minutes with my advisor?” So that was part of it.
But meanwhile, I guess I became more acquainted with some of the things Weinberg was doing, and I realized, although I wasn't that impressed by the quality of the instruction in his cosmology class, I thought cosmology was really interesting, and the idea of someone who was pursuing research that was relevant to both particle physics and cosmology appealed to me. And even more so, when the idea started to bubble up that we could learn things about particle physics by studying cosmology. Grand Unification had a lot to do with that. Of course, I did learn about Grand Unification. I would say that was one of the obvious exciting things going on in my early years in graduate school. And it became more exciting when Georgi, Quinn, and Weinberg computed, from the running of the couplings, the Grand Unification scale. Originally, Georgi and Glashow had just noted the scale had to be high, or else the proton would be too short-lived.
But by actually calculating the coupling unification scale, that seemed to indicate at first that proton decay might be right on the edge of observability, and that helped to stimulate the early experiments to detect proton decay, which wound up detecting neutrinos from Supernova 1987A and all that. But the idea that you could observationally learn something about these incredibly high-energy scales by doing the right kinds of observations was exciting to me. And then, the idea came along that baryogenesis, the origin of the excess of matter over antimatter in the universe, had an explanation coming from Grand Unification, where there would be baryon-number-violating interactions, and the history of the very early universe, I thought that was very exciting.
And Steve jumped on that, too. The first paper I remember about that was by a guy named Yoshimura. And I thought that was a really cool idea right away. Actually, around the same time, Dimopoulis and Susskind were working on this, though I wasn't as keenly aware of what they were doing, but the idea that you could understand the excess of matter over antimatter using Grand Unification and early universe cosmology, I thought that was really exciting. There was a bit of a courtship in getting to know Steve. Steve was really only interested in talking about what he was interested in generally. And I didn't spend all that much time talking to him. And when I did, he was usually pumping me for information. But the way I managed to get his attention is I thought at the time that the other really exciting thing going on in theoretical particle physics was the connection of topology with particle physics.
And the two main aspects of that that were intriguing were that 't Hooft and Polyakov had pointed out that in unified theories, there could be magnetic monopoles. And also the idea of instantons, which came around the same time—again, with Polyakov and 't Hooft having a key role. These were quantum tunneling events that occur in Yang-Mills Theory, and they had consequences for QCD, in particular, providing a way of solving what people were calling at the time the U1 problem. There seemed to be a symmetry that QCD should have, which wasn't really a good symmetry.
And it turned out that was due to a so-called anomaly, that the symmetry was good at the classical level but broken by quantum effects. And to understand how that worked, you had to use these topological ideas, or at least that's how people understood it at the time, having to do with instantons. And Steve got interested in instantons at some point, and I had been actually working on a problem relating to instantons, so I knew a lot about it. And so, I was always able to answer his questions. He would ask me technical questions about instantons, which he was trying to learn, and I actually knew.
So that's how he learned my name. But yeah, he was certainly inspiring in many ways, but he never gave me much guidance, and I didn't really mind that so much. But I got guidance from other people, most of all, from the post-docs. And, of course, you learn a lot from your other students. But there were remarkable post-docs at Harvard at the time. The two who I was most inspired by were Ed Witten and Michael Peskin. And Peskin, really, was the closest thing I had to a mentor in graduate school.
Zierler:
What was Peskin working on at that point?
Preskill:
Well, we worked together on a project, actually, which had to do with instantons. And also, with my friend Orlando Alvarez, who I'd mentioned had come to Harvard from Princeton a year ahead of me. We were trying to use these instanton ideas to compute contributions to electroproduction, high-energy inelastic scattering. And we did, we worked on that a lot. It was the first serious research project I worked on. Orlando and I did most of the calculations, but Michael kind of got us started. And we had some pretty interesting results. So that was sort of how I came up to speed on these instanton methods. And my first seminars were about that work, which I'm ashamed to say, and I find a little bit inexplicable, we never published, never wrote it up, although we really did have some good results. We all sort of got distracted by other things. Not long after, Misha Shifman, and Vainshtein, and Zakharov covered some similar ideas in their papers.
The key thing that we realized is that when you do these instanton calculations, they have infrared divergences, and they show up as the instanton has a size, and you have to integrate overall the possible sizes. And if nothing cuts off that integral, it looks like you get infinite results. But what we realized is those infrared-sensitive pieces could be factored into matrix elements, and so there were other short-distance pieces that you really could compute. It was really pretty nice work. We should've written a paper. We didn't. But it still helped me get going because it gave me some confidence that I could do research that people were interested in. Howard Georgi was interested in what we were doing.
And also, Ed Witten seemed to be interested. And my first talk at a conference was actually at Caltech. That was in early 1979, there was a meeting where students were encouraged to attend, and some of us went from Harvard, and I met other students there for the first time from Princeton and other places. But there was a session in which students could volunteer to give 20-minute talks, so I signed up for that. And I was quite excited because it was an evening session, but Feynman came, and he was in the audience. He was sort of listening to the talks. Every once in a while, he'd go out in the hallway and just have informal conversations with people.
But anyway, this session went on, and on, and on. It started at 7:00, and I didn't get to talk until 10 pm. Feynman was long gone. I had a terrible cold. I could barely speak audibly because I was so hoarse. But I gave the talk, and it went well. And again, that also helped to build confidence. And I gave similar talks at Harvard. And so, then I started to feel like I was ready to do serious research.
Zierler:
In what ways did this work feed into what ultimately would be your thesis research?
Preskill:
Well, what you might be surprised to hear is that the work I did in graduate school, which became well-known, which was about magnetic monopoles produced in the early universe, was not in my thesis at all. I wrote my thesis on something different. Actually, I think it's interesting that I drew on what I learned from Sidney Coleman and from Steve Weinberg to find my problem having to do with monopoles in the early universe. I was very interested in this idea that magnetic monopoles could be understood using topological ideas applied to unified gauge theories, and that Grand Unified theories should have these magnetic monopoles. But the question I remember discussing with some of the other students, Steve Parke was one of them, was, “Who cares? Because these things are so heavy, you'll never see them experimentally. They're completely irrelevant to any physics we'll be able to do in our lifetimes. So why are you even bothering to learn about these magnetic monopoles?”
Zierler:
This is the very early beginnings of Henry Tye’s and Alan Guth's collaboration. Were you aware of what they were doing? Did you know either of them?
Preskill:
Well, I knew Alan Guth, but I wasn't aware what they were doing until later. Alan Guth was an instructor at Princeton when I was an undergrad. And speaking of great instruction at Princeton, he taught a beautiful class on classical mechanics, which I took as a junior, Goldstein Classical Mechanics. And, really, he's one of the best lecturers. He was Coleman-caliber. And he was clearly working very, very hard on that class. He told me later he was putting an enormous amount of time into it, as I'm sure he must've been. And so, I knew him for that reason. He remembered me later as a student in that class.
But no, I didn't know that Guth and Tye were interested in the issue of production of magnetic monopoles in the early universe. And there were other things that I didn't know and found out later, which preceded my work. One was Kibble had written this paper in 1976 on topological defects that could be produced in a cosmological setting. His focus was mostly on cosmic strings. I didn't know about that at the time.
And there was also a paper by Zeldovich and Khlopov about magnetic monopoles produced in the early universe. I didn't know about their work, either. But I started working on it myself. And Steve was not interested. I tried to explain it to him. “Look, there's something really interesting here,” speaking to Steve Weinberg. Grand Unified theories, we have reasons to believe they're the truth. They make this prediction, these very heavy magnetic monopoles. If there's a phase transition in the early universe, these could be created in such a phase transition, and they should still be around. In fact, there should be so many of them around that the universe would've been closed by monopoles, and it wouldn't look anything like the universe we inhabit. And first of all, he said, “Well, I'm not really sure about the magnetic monopoles existing, and I'm not really sure why I should believe you that they were produced in the early universe. This is all so speculative.”
And it was a little discouraging that my PhD advisor thought I was barking up the wrong tree. But there were other people who did encourage me. Michael Peskin was one. And some people, I actually got some technical advice from. One was Bert Halperin, a condensed matter physicist, but he knew a lot about topological defects in the condensed matter setting. And he helped me to set up a calculation of how many of these monopoles would be created in a phase transition. And another was Ed Purcell, who was, of course, a wonderful man. And I knew Ed because I was TA for his quantum mechanics class. And he was very interested in magnetic monopoles, and in fact, had been involved in searches for them some years earlier, and followed subsequent efforts to detect magnetic monopoles or put limits on their abundance. And actually, there had been a little bit of a false alarm around the time I was entering graduate school. Price claimed to have detected a magnetic monopole in a cosmic ray event, which was later debunked by Luis Alvarez and others as just a misinterpretation of something that could be explained by more conventional phenomena.
Zierler:
It's almost too delicious to think of how, in some ways, Bert Halperin, as a condensed matter theorist, was more helpful in developing your dissertation idea than Steve Weinberg. Can you explain a little bit the science for how Bert's background might've actually been useful? Because at first glance, it's hard to see how condensed matter theory would be relevant for this line of inquiry.
Preskill:
Well, as I mentioned, what I thought was the most exciting thing in my first few years of graduate school that was happening was these topological ideas coming into particle physics, particularly in the theory of magnetic monopoles and instantons. But topological ideas were also becoming increasingly useful in condensed matter, where in different materials, there can be topological defects associated with spontaneous breaking of symmetries. Not usually gauge symmetries in the case of the magnetic monopoles. Well, actually, in the case of a superconductor, a vortex in a superconductor is an example of a topological defect in a gauge theory. That is sort of a prototypical example of such a topological defect. Bert knew everything about superconductors. He knew all about vortices. But also, there were point-like defects that occurred in three-dimensional materials like liquid crystals. And Bert knew about that, too.
Furthermore, what I was interested in is what would happen if there was a phase transition in the early universe. If it's SU5, for example—which is the gauge group—it had been understood in the previous few years that at high temperature, even if the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken—if the Higgs phenomenon occurs at low temperature, at high temperature that symmetry would be restored. So, you would expect very early in the universe that the SU5 symmetry was still intact, but as the universe cooled, the symmetry breaking would occur. There might be a sequence of phase transitions, but there should at least at some point be a transition to the phase in which SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, the symmetry of the Standard Model, is the unbroken remaining gauge symmetry. And one could show that the breakdown of SU5 to the Standard Model would give rise to stable magnetic monopoles. The question was, how abundantly would they be created?
And there were a couple of ways of looking at that, one of which was really the idea that Kibble had discussed, although I didn't know his paper at the time, which is that there's an order parameter, which is fluctuating around, you're in the symmetric phase, but then it freezes out. Like, for example, if you're cooling a material, and it goes from paramagnetic phase to a ferromagnetic phase, the magnetization locks in, and all the spins line up. And that is the same kind of phenomenon where the symmetry is restored at high temperature and then becomes spontaneously broken at a critical point.
And I thought the same thing would happen in a unified gauge theory. And that that would give rise to the possibility of magnetic monopoles, for one thing, just because of relativistic causality. When the magnetization turns on, the magnetization at one point in space has no way of knowing to line up with the magnetization of another point in space because there hasn't been time for a light signal to travel between this domain and that domain. And so, as the spins start to line up, there will be knots that get locked in. Those are the topological defects. And that's how magnetic monopoles can form.
I had that idea, but Bert told me a different idea, which was that even if the phase transition were a smooth phase transition, if it were second order, that because the order parameters would be fluctuating, you would expect to get a lot of defects, even not taking into account the effects of relativistic causality, and that's what he showed me how to calculate. Which, because I wound up writing a very short letter-length article, got squeezed down to, like, a paragraph or something without many details. That was another thing. Steve did give me one piece of advice. I asked him where I should publish the result that he didn't find very interesting, and he made a suggestion which really surprised me. He said Nature. The particle physics students didn't read Nature. That was where there were papers about astronomy and stuff like that, or biology. But Steve at least had the notion that there was something of broad interest about what I was doing because it related to cosmology, to particle physics, and even to condensed matter ideas.
Zierler:
It was of broad interest, but not particularly interesting to him.
Preskill:
Not interesting enough, but broad. [laugh] But Bert said, “No, Physical Review Letters would be better.” So that's where I submitted it, and it was rejected because first of all, it wasn't novel enough. It'd actually be interesting for me to dig up that referee report. I think I still have it. But also, that it didn't seem to be right because I had overestimated the abundance of the monopoles for some reason which the reviewer didn't explain. But the editors, to their credit, said, “Well, we'll give you a chance to respond and resubmit.” But it was a very bad day because I was already in my fourth year of graduate school. I had no papers. And this was my first one. And it got rejected. And I was pretty depressed. So, I remember my wife thought this would cheer me up—we went shopping, and we bought a color TV set. Up until then, our TV set was this little black and white TV set. And it did cheer me up a little to have a color TV. But anyway, I resubmitted the single-author paper, and it did get accepted.
But what really seems funny and odd to me, looking back, is that when I was applying for post-docs, I had no publications. I had this one preprint, the one about magnetic monopole production in the early universe. And nothing had been published, and that was it. And yet, that didn't seem to be too big an impediment to getting good post-doc offers because that one paper was getting a fair amount of attention. Now, coming back to Henry Tye and Alan Guth, after my preprint came out, Alan invited me to visit Cornell. I don't think Henry was there. I think he was traveling. It was during the summer.
Zierler:
He was probably in China at that point.
Preskill:
Yeah, I think that's probably right. But Alan was there, and, of course, like I said, I knew him from my undergraduate days. And by that time, Michael Peskin was at Cornell. And I think Steve Shenker was there. Yeah, I think he was still a student there. Steve Shenker was there. And Ken Wilson. That was the first time I had a chance to sit-- Ken Wilson is one of my heroes. And although I had met him during his visit to Harvard, I'm sure he didn't know me. But during that visit, I got a chance to sit down with Ken and chat. I think that may be really the only time that we ever had a serious talk about physics, so that was memorable.
Zierler:
Do you remember what you talked about?
Preskill:
Yeah, magnetic monopoles. And actually, he thought my paper was wrong. And he thought it was wrong because he thought the magnetic monopoles would be confined. And he was wrong. And I'm not sure I convinced him.
Zierler:
You were confident at this point though.
Preskill:
I knew a lot about magnetic monopoles. Yeah. But anyway, I talked to Alan a lot. I don't remember, was their paper out yet? Not sure. But they had some of the same ideas, and I guess you've already talked to Alan. But I'd been pretty careful in analyzing if a significant number of monopoles were produced, how many of them would survive. And I had an argument, which I thought was pretty convincing, that unless something nonstandard happened in the cosmology, it just couldn't work, that the production of the monopoles was unavoidable. It would be copious, they wouldn't annihilate fast enough, and the universe would be closed by them many times over, and that couldn't be our cosmology, so there had to be some way out.
And during the following fall, I probably should've thought about that more. Because I figured there had to be something about the phase transition that was unconventional. But by that time, I had gotten interested in a different topic, which is what I did end up writing my thesis on, which was technicolor, as we called it at the time. The breaking of electroweak symmetry by strong interaction. So, of course, Alan famously continued thinking about it and had the insight that inflation could blow the monopoles away, but he also, to his credit, realized that that could explain the flatness and isotropy of the universe. And, of course, that idea was very explosive when it came out. That paper had a lot of impact right away. I remember him coming to Harvard and giving a talk about it, which was received with a lot of excitement.
Zierler:
Did you see the transition to technicolor as switching gears? Was it related?
Preskill:
It wasn't that closely related, but I thought the ideas were quite exciting. I was particularly inspired by a paper by Lenny Susskind, which is actually a little ironic because Steve Weinberg had written a related paper. He didn't call it technicolor, but he did call it dynamical breaking of electroweak symmetry, which is what it is. And his paper was, in a way, sort of typical Weinberg style. He calculated everything, and he correctly discussed all the issues. It was a little dry.
And Lenny Susskind is also one of my heroes because of his creativity as a scientist, but also he's a very charismatic communicator in writing and in person. And this was an inspiring paper. And what he realized, which Weinberg had not, was something quite simple, which was, in the Weinberg-Salam Model, the so-called rho parameter, which basically says that the ratio of the W to Z mass is determined by the Weinberg mixing angle theta-W. Steve, by the way, always claimed the W in theta-W stood for weak, and he wouldn't call it the Weinberg angle. He called it the weak mixing angle, in a burst of modesty.
But at any rate, Murray Gell-Mann always liked to say in his snide way, “Oh, we call this angle theta-W because W stands for the last letter in the word Glashow.” [laugh] Anyway, Murray and Steve were not fans of one another. So what Lenny said in his paper was that you could understand how the Weinberg angle was related to the W of Z masses just from a symmetry consideration, and that in the dynamical symmetry breaking scenario, that symmetry would naturally be present, and that the dynamics that you needed was dynamics that we already understood fairly well from QCD—the breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD, which is responsible for the pion being much lighter than other hadrons. That could occur with this new strong interaction with a similar structure to QCD, but which becomes strong at a higher scale, at the weak scale like a TeV, or a few hundred GeV rather than a few hundred MeV, as in QCD. That could account for how the electroweak symmetries get broken. And Lenny called this new strong interaction “technicolor.”
And what I found so appealing about this was that because it was dynamical, it should be highly constrained. One thing I found very curious and was very interested in, for some years, starting when I was in graduate school is, where do the quark and lepton masses come from? In the Standard Model, they're just free parameters. You write down Yukawa couplings, they can be anything, and those determine the mixing angles like the Cabibbo angle and the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, it's all free parameters. Same thing for all the masses. And what fun is that? You'd like to be able to explain where those masses come from. And I thought in a dynamical scenario, we'd be able to do that much better.
I was very interested in those ideas for a couple of years, and it turned out that these dynamical scenarios are so constrained that it was very hard to come up with a viable phenomenology. Because you didn't have the same kind of freedom you do when you have Higgs fields, where you can choose Yukawa couplings to be whatever you want. Explaining the masses of the quarks, and leptons, and all that became very challenging. Actually, I'll tell you something funny. When I first came to Caltech, that was in 1983, I thought the important problem in particle physics was to explain those quark and lepton masses. I thought, “If we could do that, if we could understand what that hint was telling us, that would be a good path to understanding what's beyond the Standard Model.”
And so, to remind myself that was important, I made a chart which showed all the masses, the spectrum of quarks and leptons, and I posted it in my office on the bulletin board so I'd see it every day to remind me, “This is the important thing to think about.” And then, a couple of years went by, and one day, I was talking to Mark Wise in my office, who occupied the office next door, and we looked at that chart, which had been on the bulletin board, roasting in the sun every afternoon, and the masses had all faded away. They'd been bleached by the sun. And we took that to be some kind of metaphor for how this problem somehow was too elusive to admit an easy solution. And by that time, I wasn't thinking about it anymore.
Zierler:
I want to ask, at this point, when you're really starting to solidify your identity in theoretical physics, going from magnetic monopoles to technicolor, did you feel at the time that you dipped a toe into cosmology, and then went sort of back to your home intellectual environment of particle theory?
Preskill:
Well, yeah. I don't know if I looked at it that way. But because I got excited about technicolor, I sort of dropped the cosmology ball for a while and focused on technicolor. My interest in cosmology got reactivated partly because of another experimental false alarm. In 1982, Blas Cabrera thought he saw a magnetic monopole. It was on Valentine's Day, 1982. I was still at Harvard. By then, I was on the faculty. And that seemed incredible and really exciting. And hard to explain. He had this little loop of superconducting wire and saw the flux jump, which he interpreted as evidence that a magnetic monopole had passed through the loop. And so, one needed to understand why magnetic monopoles would be plentiful enough for Blas Cabrera to detect one, and at the same time, not do other things, which the astrophysicists told us would be bad. Parker, in particular, had gotten a bound on the abundance of monopoles from observing that if there's a magnetic monopole plasma in the galaxy, it'll short out the galactic magnetic field on some time scale short compared to the galactic rotation time, which cranks up the dynamo.
And so, was there something wrong with that argument? Guess that wasn't really cosmology. But at any rate, we did realize that if the monopoles were very heavy, the story was changed because Parker had assumed they got relativistic velocities, which for the types of monopoles predicted by grand unified theories, needn't be the case. They'd more likely have typical virial velocities in the galaxy like 10 to the minus 3 c. Of course, it turned out Blas Cabrera never saw another magnetic monopole. But it was exciting for a while. And actually, that helped to elevate my star a little bit maybe because now everybody was excited about magnetic monopoles and where they came from. And I was asked to give talks about that and things like that.
Zierler:
To clarify, when you say that Cabrera never saw another one, is that to suggest it's possible that what he saw was a magnetic monopole?
Preskill:
Well, it seems extremely unlikely, right? Because he would've had to be incredibly lucky to see that one and be consistent with other bounds we have on the flux. So no, I don't think he ever explained, or at least never publicly explained, what went wrong or what the right interpretation was of the event he saw. But no, it wasn't a magnetic monopole, sad to say.
Yeah, so then, the next foray into cosmology which had some impact concerned axions and predicting that they could potentially be the dark matter. And probably Alan Guth told you about this workshop, the Nuffield Workshop in 1982 in Cambridge. I was there. It was organized by Stephen Hawking and Gary Gibbons. It was a pretty exciting event. And the big topic there was whether inflation could explain the origin of galaxies by seeding the density perturbations from which galaxies grew. And there was a lot of disagreement at the beginning of that three-week workshop about what inflation predicted.
And I'm sure you discussed this with Alan, but after the idea of inflation, which seemed very exciting, trouble was brewing because how inflation ended was unclear. And Alan and others had done computations of how as bubbles of true vacuum appeared in the false vacuum in a phase transition, whether those bubbles would succeed in filling up the universe and giving rise to a reheated universe that would then be described by Big Bang cosmology, and he couldn't get this to work. But then, around I guess it must've been the end of 1981, the idea by Andrei Linde, and Albrecht and Steinhardt, that instead of having to go through a barrier, the universe could sort of roll off the table to end inflation. The energy density would be high because you'd be on a plateau of a potential function, but rolling along, and then you'd start to oscillate in the potential after you roll off this flat part. And that would give rise to reheating.
So, what everybody was interested in was what kind of perturbations of density would be produced in that transition from the inflationary phase to the more standard radiation-dominated phase. And so, Alan, and Starobinsky, and Turner, Steinhardt, and Bardeen, and Hawking, they were all trying to calculate those things. So that was sort of the focal point of excitement. But I went there to talk about magnetic monopoles and to think about what axions might have to do with cosmology. And Frank Wilczek was there, too, who had an interest in axions, as the founder of them—
Actually, just to backpedal for a second, this is sort of a funny story. Or maybe, I don't know, sort of a typical experience of a graduate student. In the fall of 1977, I crank up my courage, and I go to see Steve Weinberg. I'd like suggestions for a research problem to work on. And so, he responded immediately with the thing that he was thinking about that day. What was it? Well, he had just read this paper by Peccei and Quinn that would explain potentially the solution to the strong CP problem, why CP is a very good symmetry of the strong interactions. And their idea has something to do with the Higgs sector, and how you can introduce another Higgs field, and that can help. “So what might be interesting to work out is, what's the phenomenology of this type of model with more than one Higgs field?”
So, I thought that sounded interesting. So, like any graduate student would, I spent the next couple of weeks reading everything I could find on Higgs phenomenology. But then, Steve, after a few weeks, announced he was giving a seminar, and he explained the idea, which we now called the axion. He actually called it the Higglet, because it was a little Higgs, a light Higgs, at the time.
Zierler:
The Higglet never caught on.
Preskill:
[laugh] Higglet didn't catch on. And Frank's good at names, isn't he?
Zierler:
Yeah, yeah.
Preskill:
And so, Steve was trying to figure out at that point whether the Higglet was ruled out by experiments that had already been done. But I was a little miffed because I thought, “Boy, Steve suggested this problem. Why didn't he tell me that he was making progress? And here I am, spending every waking hour learning about Higgs phenomenology, so I'll be ready to dive in.” But, of course, I'm sure Steve didn't give it another thought. I doubt he remembered that he had even mentioned it to me. I just happened to walk into his office at the time he was looking at the paper or something. Anyway, I was reminded of that. [laugh]
Zierler:
While we're still on graduate school, who was on your committee?
Preskill:
Weinberg, Coleman, Georgi, and Estia Eichten, who was junior faculty at Harvard at that time. I do have a very disturbing memory of my exam, actually. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this, probably. Well, here's the thing. I didn't understand what a PhD defense was. Somehow, I didn't realize I was expected to give a presentation. How could I have not known this? All the other students seemed to know it. So, I thought, “Well, they've all read my thesis, and they'll come in, and they'll ask me questions about it.” I had nothing prepared. My thesis was related to technicolor. Didn't have anything to do with cosmology and magnetic monopoles. But actually, it was something Steve was very interested in.
I'll tell you something funny about that, too. It was very Weinbergian, what I did. I studied what's called the vacuum alignment problem. And what that means is, you have spontaneous symmetry breaking, but you also have some explicit breaking of the symmetry. And the explicit breaking of the symmetry determines which of the degenerate vacua will actually get preferred. If you have a ferromagnet, and you turn on a small magnetic field, then the lower energy vacuum will be the true vacuum. And so, in this case, I had some global symmetries, but then because I also introduced gauge interactions, that explicitly broke some of those symmetries. And the interesting thing was that the way that the symmetry breaking aligned with the gauge symmetry gave rise to some phenomenological predictions, that there would be light mesons coming from the technicolor sector that you might be able to see in collider experiments and stuff like that.
And I gave a talk about this in early 1980 at Harvard. And Steve was there, and he seemed enthusiastic about it. And then, maybe a month or two later. Now, I mentioned Michael Peskin earlier. Michael, that year, the 1979-1980 academic year, was spending the year in France at Saclay as a visitor, and he had written a paper on a very similar topic with very similar conclusions while he was in France, and I hadn't been communicating with him. And he sent it to Weinberg. And so, I don't remember exactly why, but I came into Steve's office, and he said, “I have this paper from Peskin. It's very interesting, and he does blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “But, Steve, that's what I talked about at that seminar two months ago.” He didn't remember that at all. Later, maybe he recollected, he was apologetic about expressing that enthusiasm about Peskin's paper without realizing that much of it overlapped with the content of my thesis.
So anyway, that's what was in the thesis, so I figured I had a receptive audience because I knew Howard was also quite interested, and Estia, too. But I didn't prepare anything. And Arthur Jaffe also came, and he brought Cliff Taubes, who was his graduate student and was actually my officemate. And Cliff became a famous topologist. He’s won many awards, and he's a great mathematician now. They thought I was going to talk about magnetic monopoles, which they were both interested in, so they came in to hear my talk. And I just got up there, and Steve said, “OK, now you can begin.” And I thought, “What”" I had nothing prepared. So I just started mumbling about what was in my thesis very stream-of-consciousness. It must've been excruciating to listen to. And that was my PhD exam.
Zierler:
But you survived. You lived to tell the tale.
Preskill:
I lived, yeah. But I try not to think about it. But that's what really happened.
Zierler:
Was the game plan to stay at Harvard already buttoned up before your defense?
Preskill:
Yes. So, I became a junior fellow after my PhD in the Harvard Society of Fellows. The Society of Fellows, at least in those days, would appoint eight new fellows every year, and they were in all fields. Not just science, in fact, humanities as well. But it was kind of typical to have one or two theoretical physicists in a class, and pretty often, they were Harvard graduate students, not always, who became junior fellows. Some of my predecessors the previous year or two were Paul Steinhardt, who got a Harvard PhD and became a junior fellow, and also Ian Affleck, who later became a very distinguished condensed matter theorist, though he was doing particle theory at the time. So, in my year, I became a junior fellow, and also in that same year was Mark Wise, who became a good friend. He had been a graduate student with Fred Gilman at Stanford. And Cliff Taubes, who was doing topology. We were all junior fellows together.
Zierler:
Was your sense that the Society was essentially finishing school to see if you could elevate to become a Harvard professor?
Preskill:
I didn't really look at it that way because it was so rare for junior fellows, or even Harvard junior faculty, to become tenured professors.
Zierler:
So as naive as you were about what a thesis defense was, you clearly understood the culture of not promoting from within at Harvard.
Preskill:
Oh, that was well-known. Although, actually, we used to joke about it, the students, because we were aware that there had been, in recent years, strong assistant professors doing excellent research who had not gotten tenure at Harvard. Tom Applequist was one who was a couple years ahead of when I arrived. And actually, I had two collaborators who were junior faculty while I was in graduate school, Estia Eichten and Ken Lane. And there was not any serious expectation that they would become tenured professors at Harvard, and they didn't. But, of course, they both went on to good careers. And that was the typical pattern with the Harvard junior faculty, and with the junior fellows, that they would usually go elsewhere and be successful. Now, I did something unusual. I was a junior fellow for only one year, even though it was a three-year appointment. I became an assistant professor and then an associate professor in the following two years.
Zierler:
And, of course, the associate professor is not tenured.
Preskill:
No, and I didn't really think it was likely that I would get tenure, and I wound up going to Caltech.
Zierler:
But to be promoted to associate is an indication that it's a step in the right direction.
Preskill:
Well, maybe so. But actually, what happened was this. My wife had just gotten her business degree at MIT at the Sloan School, what everybody else calls an MBA, but they call a Master's of Science in Management, and she was working at a company that seemed like a real up-and-coming company, Digital Equipment Corporation, which made the VAX minicomputer and other products. And it looked like she was off to a great start in her career, and we wanted to have the flexibility of staying in the Boston area longer. And I thought if I transitioned into the junior faculty slot, although it would mean I'd have to teach and other stuff, we would at least have the flexibility to stick around longer. As it turned out, I didn't do that. I was only at Harvard for three years.
Actually, I remember I was visiting Santa Barbara. This was at the very beginnings of what was then the Institute for Theoretical Phy | |||
2453 | dbpedia | 0 | 75 | https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/abstract.html | en | Previous Abstracts | [
"https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/pizza.gif",
"https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~sr1508/cat.jpg"
] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | null | May 1, 2009
Speaker: Philip Matchett Wood
Title: Stacks of Blocks and a Variety of Stacking Schemes
Abstract: Say you have n wooden blocks and a table. Can you stack up the blocks so that one block is suspended over the edge of the table; that is, can you stack the blocks so that one particular block is supported by other blocks, but no part of the table is directly below the particular block?
Though seemingly simple, this question has inspired some very interesting mathematics that combines basic physics, combinatorics, and computer science. This talk will focus on concrete examples, and will discuss some classical results and also recent work by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick and by Paterson, Peres, Thorup, Winkler, and Zwick.
The block stacking problem is an age-old question that is sometimes called the book-stacking problem, and it also works quite well with a deck of cards (as pointed out by Ron Graham at the 2009 Joint Mathematics Meetings). Speaking of which, it would be great if some of you could bring along decks of cards to stack with. Also, Jay---can we have this talk in a room with desks? I conducted a thought experiment involving stacking slices of pizza on the edge of a paper plate I was holding in my mind, and, well, let's just say the carpet in my thought experiment may never be quite the same.
Hope to see you there!
P.S. I have been told that "stack", "variety", and even "scheme" are remarkable and sometimes hard to understand concepts in algebraic geometry (if you don't believe me, check out the top google hit for stack variety scheme ). As far as I can tell, these are totally unrelated to stacking blocks.
October 31, 2008
Speaker: Vidit Nanda
Title: Buffon's Needle Problem
Abstract: It is a fine winter morning in Paris. Le Comte de Buffon, nursing a level-7 hangover from various cognac-related excesses of the night before, screams angrily at the help who have bungled his breakfast again. As the veal (medium rare) and the wine (Merlot, bien entendu) sink in, he rummons the strength to stand and ponder the following:
"Suppose that you drop a short needle on ruled paper - what is then the probability that the needle comes to lie in a position where it crosses one of the lines? "
We will solve Buffon's Needle Problem twice. Once in the standard way, and once with the cute - yet insightful - trick of Barbier from 1860. The answer provides a way for anyone with the simple luxuries of 1) a needle, 2) a sheet of ruled paper, and 3) infinite time to estimate Pi accurately.
April 25, 2008
Speaker: Eduardo Osorio
Title: Untitled
Abstract: Hi Pizza seminar attendees. This Friday I will give a very basic talk on a small Financial Math result that has popped up in way too many get togethers with friends and I have been never able to explain it satisfactorily. We'll see if I can do it this time.
A call option is a financial contract between two parties, the buyer and the seller. The buyer (or holder) of the option has the right, but not the obligation to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial instrument (the underlying instrument) from the seller at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (the strike price). The seller is obligated to sell the commodity or financial instrument should the buyer decides to exercise such an option.
A European call option allows the holder to exercise the option only on the agreed expiration date. An American call option allows exercise at any time during the life of the option. Because of this early exercise feature, the american call option on a stock (say a Google stock) is at least as valuable as its European counterpart. Well, it turns out that in the case that the stock price follows the dynamics of a Geometric Brownian Motion (a model widely used) the early exercise feature for a call on a stock (paying no dividends) is worthless. I will attempt to introduce (very) shortly and roughly how to price these options, and then I will show that their price is the same.
February 29, 2008
Speaker: Eric Rowland
Title: The Crazy Thue-Morse Sequence
Abstract: Since this talk falls on February 29th, I decided that I should choose a subject matter that is equally unusual and mysterious. So I will talk about the Thue-Morse sequence -- a sequence of 0s and 1s with a very regular but nonperiodic structure. It begins
0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 ... .
We'll see this sequence cropping up in infinitely long games of chess, strange iterated products, multigrades (sets of integers for which $\sum_{a \in A} a^i = \sum_{b \in B} b^i$ holds for several different values of $i$), and alfalfa. I'll also talk about the class of automatic sequences (of which Thue-Morse is the first example) and a generalization to infinite alphabets (namely the integers).
April 20, 2007
Speaker: John Bryk
Title: In Which John Bryk Proves Something Neat about Transcendental Numbers
Abstract:
In the mid-1930's, Gelfond and Schneider independently proved that if a and b are algebraic numbers, then a^b is transcendental (excluding the trivial cases a = 0, 1 or b rational). I had never bothered to look up the proof myself, partly because transcendental number theory isn't my cup of tea, and partly because I imagined the proof to be quite hard. Although the former is still true, I recently found out that the latter isn't.
In this talk, I will discuss transcendental numbers. The main result I will prove roughly states that if f and g are well-behaved analytic functions algebraically independent over the rationals, then f(z) and g(z) are both algebraic for only finitely many z. The proof uses little more than linear algebra and the maximum modulus principle. Immediate consequences of the theorem include the Gelfond-Schneider Theorem as well as the classical facts that e and pi are transcendental.
April 21, 2006
Speaker: Philip Matchett Wood
Title: The Pentagon Game
Abstract: This talk is based on the work of Richard Schwartz, and named for his two daughters Lucy and Lily.
Suppose you have a regular pentagon in the plane that is centered at the origin. Suppose also that this pentagon may be moved around in the plane by being reflected over a line containing one of its edges. So you always have five possible moves that can be made.
Now, suppose that one night while you are sleeping someone _else_ makes 50 random moves of your pentagon. When you wake up, how long will it take you to move the pentagon back to being centered at the origin?
Just to give an idea that moving the pentagon back to the origin might not be easy, note that using the edge reflection moves, the positions of the center of the pentagon are dense in the plane. So, for example, when you wake up,you might find that the origin is _inside_ your pentagon, but the pentagon is_still_ not centered.
Want to find out more? Come to pizza seminar!!
March 3, 2006
Speaker: Eduardo Osorio
Title: Stochastic Approach to Deterministic Boundary Value Problems
Abstract: Pdf of Abstract here
NOTE: the abstract printed below does not render properly in HTML, but the above pdf _will_.
Let's recall the most celebrated boundary value problem:
Given a (nice) domain Ãâàin $R^n$ and a continuous function g on the boundary of ÃâÃÂ, @ÃâÃÂ, find a function u continuous on the closure Ãâàof Ãâàsuch that
(i) u = g on @ÃâÃÂ
(ii) u is harmonic in ÃâÃÂ, i.e, Ãââu := n Xi=1 @2u @x2 i = 0 in ÃâÃÂ:
In 1944 Kakutani proved that the solution could be expressed in terms of Brownian motion: u(x) is the expected value of g at the first exit point from U of the Brownian motion starting at x 2 U.
It turned out that this was just the tip of an iceberg: For a large class of semielliptic second order partial differential equations the corresponding Dirichlet boundary value problem can be solved using a stochastic process which is a solution of an associated stochastic differential equation (and viceversa). In this talk we won’t go that far, but we should have enough time to eat some pizza and discuss what Kakutani proved...
February 10, 2006
Speaker: Prof R. Falk & Prof G. Cherlin
Title:Two Faculty Glimpses
Abstract (from Prof Cherlin):
Model theory deals with very general algebraic systems, but frequently leads back to algebraic geometry and specifically to algebraic groups. I aim to indicate why that is. Part of the explanation is conjectural.
Abstract (from Prof Falk):
Title: Approximation of Partial Differential Equations by the Finite Element Method:
The finite element method is one of the major advances in numerical computing of the past century. It has become an indispensable tool for simulation of a wide variety of phenomena arising in science and engineering. A tremendous asset of finite elements is that they not only provide a methodology to develop numerical algorithms for simulation, but also a theoretical framework in which to assess the accuracy of the computed solutions.
This talk introduces the basic ideas of approximation of partial differential equations by the finite element method. These include variational formulations of boundary value problems (on which the finite element method is based), the construction and approximation properties of finite element (i.e, piecewise polynomial) spaces, and a discussion of rigorous error estimates for such approximation schemes. |